Knowlarity: Creators of Knowlus, a cloud-based telephony platform

Started in early 2009, Knowlarity is the one of the prominent faces of the cloud telephony based solutions space inIndia. With offices in Delhi, Noida,Lucknow, Mumbai and Muzaffarpur, the company has seen tremendously positive response since its inception and to know more about the business idea, YourStory.in caught up with the young entrepreneur Ambarish Gupta, the co-founder of Knowlarity. Ambarish graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology,Kanpur with a degree in Computer Science in 2000 and received his MBA fromCarnegie Mellon University,USA in 2007. Given below are the excerpts from the interview:Tell us about your flagship product, Knowlus.

The heart of Knowlarity is a cloud telephony platform called "Knowlus". The Knowlus platform is raw calling power with extended usability through programmable APIs. Knowlarity is proud to be the first inIndiato deploy a cloud based telephony platform. The end to end platform has been developed in-house by our hard working engineers using open source technologies. Knowlus has proved faster and flexible than any of the other competing platforms. The mission continues to be to deliver ground-breaking telephony solutions over Knowlus to improve the way businesses use phones inIndia.

We understand that you have thousands of clients within two years of inception. Would you be able to share some names?

Yes, we have more than 8000 clients in a span of just 2 years. Our client list includes brands and organizations like  Airtel, BPCL, Government of Uttar Pradesh, Government of Uttarakhand, Colgate, P&G, Pepsi, Unitech,  Hotel Radisson, Metro Hospital, Park Plaza Hotel, Era Group, NTPC, General Motors, Adobe, Noida Police, Fortis Health care, ITM College and, JeevanSathi.com.

Take us through your work with the Mid-day Meal scheme for Government of Uttar Pradesh.

The Mid-day Meal (MDM) Scheme is the popular name for school meal program inIndia. It involves provision of lunch free of cost to school-children on all working days. The key objectives of the program are protecting children from classroom hunger, increasing school enrolment and attendance, improved socialization among children belonging to all castes, addressing malnutrition and social empowerment through provision of employment to women.

MDM had no efficient means of tracking and monitoring the actual process whether the meals were being served. This lack of information led to widespread corruption and under-performance of lunch distribution program.

A solution over the Supercaller platform using Knowlus APIs generates Interactive Voice Response (IVR)-based phone calls to over 1.5 lakh teachers

between 10 o’clock to noon daily in all 72 districts of Uttar Pradesh. It asks for the number of students for which the meal has been cooked that day. The teacher responds simply by punching the number of students on his phone. The data is automatically fed to the server set up in Delhi which is connected with the website of Mid Day Meal Authority of UP. Officials who have access to the system can check the data anytime.

The automated calls helped in registering the total number of students who had their lunch. The data collated was then processed by which the under-performing areas were highlighted to take corrective action and hence, improved the MDM distribution process.

What is your Knowlarity’s revenue model?

We have multiple hosted telephony products - Superfax, Superreceptionist, Superconference etc. targeted towards SMEs and enterprises. The products are sold through a common direct and channels sales network. We focus on CORE - Cloud telephony-based Recurring revenue Enterprise products, with customer acquisition costs lower than first year revenue

What is your target market?

Knowlarity targets the 1.4 crore SME market. The company has already built up a stellar team and product portfolio. We are trying to set an example as to how to build an aggressive Indian company that is targeting global markets.

We strongly believe that small and medium size enterprises inIndiaare the growth engine ofIndiaeconomy. These entrepreneurs run their business on their mobile phones. The founders of Knowlarity dreamed to enable these millions of entrepreneurs with innovative, inexpensive and hosted telephony based business products that can help businesses improve their bottom-line.

To know more, check out www.knowlarity.in. Also, do let us know what you think of this story by writing to us at [email protected].

Jubin Mehta | YourStory