Adaptation, Adoption and Success; The Story of WINIT

Make a list of the world top 500 companies from the year 1912, which is a hundred years ago, and compare it to the same list of the year 2012. It would be very surprising to see even one company appear in both lists. This is testament to how volatile the nature of the industrial ecosystem is. In continually changing circumstances, companies and even industries become irrelevant over time.

A recent epidemic that put a lot of companies out of business was the economic recession of 2007. Many technology companies were badly hit by a sudden loss of clients and had to shut shop.However, there have been those who have survived. Adaptability and early adoption have been a defining attribute of the survivors and WINIT is a survivor. This is the story of a 14 year old company that has borne the brunt of the economic recession, adapted to changing scenarios, adopted newer technologies and is now a leader in the mobile apps strategy and development market.

YourStory.in caught up with Prakash Sreewatsav, the founder of WINIT and in this interview, he shared with us the ordeals of the recession, WINIT's second coming, its current workings of the company and his future prediction of the mobile industry.

[Edited Excerpts]

WINIT was a web development company before 2007. How and why did you enter the mobile apps market?

Prior to 2006, we were a web development company and we were doing very well for ourselves. Come 2006 the recession hit everyone in web development space very badly and we were not different. A lot of our clients dropped out and we were in a very bad situation.

Fortunately for us, the iPhone released in 2007 and we quickly adopted the technology. We quickly moved all our clients to our mobile offerings and from then on we have been a core mobility company. We have close to 200 people

We still do some web related work, in terms of creating backends and middlewares between the phone apps and websites, but mainly from an app perspective

Being an early adopter of mobility, what are some key learnings from this industry and how have you used it for WINIT's success in the recent years?

We make apps for businesses. Apps fit in very well as a marketing and engagement platform for businesses. It can be a key part of a company's marketing strategy in terms of engagement.

Take for example one of our clients. Masafi is like the Bisleri of the middle east. We automized their whole salesforce using android phones. Prior to this they were using bulky PDA's which weren't really efficient. The solution uses extreme ‘Thinking Mobile’ for example, making use of location by geocoding the destinations that the sales men travel to.

Similarly we are driving mobility for GMR Delhi airport and Air Arabia. In these cases, our relatively longer experiences with mobility help in providing great user experience and effectiveness of the app using efficient middlewares. More importantly it lets organizations mark out clear revenue expectations from the mobility initiatives.

Fortunately for us, most people haven't got mobility right yet. A testimonial to this is how Facebook too is struggling in terms of monetization through mobility! Some of our clients already have apps, but when we have to look into it, we have redo those apps nine times out of ten.

Personally, the most important part of an app is its strategy and user experience, and not everyone has got it right. In terms of getting the middleware right,

not a lot of people can do it well and the alternatives are non existent or very expensive. Luckily we have an edge here.The early start that we got has really helped us in this regard.

What is the ownership profile at WINIT? Who are some of the key people at WINIT?

We are a husband and wife team! My wife is an MBA in finance and takes care of the finance aspect of the company. I'm the founder and CEO of the company. We have Dr. Bala, who is a PhD in computer science, and he's our CTO and a strong delivery lead in Ujjwal who has been with the company since its inception.

Other than this, we have about 15 people in the team lead and project manager roles and overall the company has close to 200 employees.

What is your aim for WINIT for the next 5 years?

I think making plans for the next 5 years in this industry is almost foolish! However we do have a short term goal for the next few years. Last year we grew by a 100% and are did about 14 crores in revenue. We want to double that this year and want to hit the 100 crore mark by the next 3 years or so.

From an offerings point of view, we want to innovate through mobility and provide solutions backed by analytics. In the coming years, analytics is going to be everything and we have heavily invested in our own analytics system as well.

Is the evolution from a technology company to a business solution provider a trend?

The nature of the business is such isn't it? Technology is very important and whatever we're doing now is because of this, but you cannot be a services company forever.

I think WINIT in that respect has graduated from a services company to a business solution provider. Our association with our clients is a lot longer and we strategize with them on how to benefit from mobile apps.

Having done enough projects in the customer engagement apps, our platform for customer engagement and app framework are also products and I think every technology company must get into product development as it grows.

What is your view on the various mobile platforms in the market today?

I think it depends on geography. In India and most parts of asia, Android is doing very well. Middle east till a few months ago was good for blackberry, but that's changing now. And if you're in the US, its going to be iOS.

What are your views on Feature Phones and what do you think about the Windows 8 platform?

I don't think there is a future for feature phones. Smartphones have really hit rock bottom prices and given a choice, i think people will go for smartphones. Yes, the number of feature phones is a lot, but its only going to reduce over time.

However, I think Windows 8 is a great platform and they are going to give Android and iPhone a good third competing platform mainly because of their experience of working with the developer ecosystem for the longest time amongst the three which has given them the understanding of developers. Another reason is they already have created a platform which shines in terms of design and user experience... We have developedsome Windows 8 apps ourselves.

From a personal perspective, we have great respect for WINIT. When hit, they didn't get bogged down; instead, they did everything that they could to get back to their feet and move on. This strength and resilience is characteristic that they share with many industry leaders and with the current demand for apps and mobile solutions, WINIT seems to have good things in store for them in the future.

Visit WINIT.