Do the right groundwork before you begin the execution, says Shafi Ahamed of Tecknodreams
After working in Hewlett Packard’s R&D, support and consulting functions, Shafi Ahamed, the CEO of Tecknodreams, now focuses on delivering an IT management tool for the SMB segment. The tool, named SapphireIMS is used by more than 120 organisations in India, many of them in the manufacturing industry, he informs, during a recent interaction with YourStory. Read on.
Tell us something about your entrepreneurial journey.
My journey into the path of entrepreneurship started fairly at an early stage of my career. I had started this journey together with my friend and classmate. Despite the challenges and obstacles, it has been a rewarding one as well; I gained a wealth of knowledge and experience in the process.
Our strength was in innovation and we were determined to create a product which could win in the global market. Building a product needed a lot of resources which were not available at the start. We started by offering product engineering services and acquired reputed customers to provide services. We got to learn various aspects of businesses and invested on creating intellectual property (IP) in parallel.
A few years later a major customer of ours got acquired and it was time for us to reassess the directions we wanted to take. We decided to pursue the path of building products and our journey of building SapphireIMS began 6 years ago.
We worked very closely with customers to get inputs which were used to shape the product and we got a break with 5 customers signing up in the first quarter of launch. It was really encouraging and the real-time feedback from customers helped to make the product complete and we listened to the customer to understand their pain-points and addressed them at frenetic pace.
This helped us to gain the confidence of customers and their references helped us to acquire more customers and partners. References also helped us to win customers globally and we have referenceable customers in South-east Asia, Middle East, Africa, Europe and the US.
New customer acquisitions, an energetic team and positive feedback from customers give me the energy and courage to face the ever-growing obstacles and challenges as an entrepreneur. The core team and the product have grown in maturity over the period. We have 125+ customers and we are looking at rapid growth in the days ahead. (Audio)
How does SapphireIMS make a difference to customers?
As enterprises increase their adoption of IT, they are faced with the challenges of managing the IT Service operations. Typical pain-points are:
- Managing service operations and ensuring service delivery against service level agreements (SLA) at the highest customer satisfaction level within the budget.
- Ensuring assets are managed properly, utilised effectively to ensure ROI, and compliant to licence and IT policies.
- Automating the preventive maintenance tasks to avoid performance degradation and to achieve efficiency.
- Ensuring mission-critical business services are available and healthy to avoid any interruption to business operations.
The above challenges are applicable across various industry verticals which include manufacturing, BFSI, IT, ITES, education, pharmaceuticals, healthcare and retail. Customers require ITSM products to address these pain-points and manage their business IT environment efficiently and within budget.
While there are products targeted at large enterprises, they are too complex to deploy and costly for the SMB segment. Though there are a few mid-range products, they do not offer complete flexibility and open source tools are not well integrated and lack support. SapphireIMS addresses this gap comprehensively. It is certified in ITIL 3.1 by Pink Elephant.
Being in the mid-scale range in terms of cost, it offers enterprise product grade flexibility for customisation which is critical to ensure successful roll out in the organisation. The SapphireIMS team also undertakes roll-out responsibility to ensure successful outcome which ensures ROI from customer perspective. We also have flexible business and delivery models like subscription-based where the software can be used from the cloud or hosted in-premise or a perpetual licence model. Customers can choose the model which suits them without feeling restricted. We work very closely with customers to understand their business needs, pain-points, bottlenecks and our product roll-out is tailored to ensure easy adaption and successful outcome. Our comprehensive round-the-clock support ensures that our customers are never alone in their challenge and we support them at every stage. (Audio)
Plans going forward.
We have aggressive plans for growth both on technology and business fronts. On the technology front, our products are getting enhanced to cater to the emerging requirements of BYOD, MDM, analytics, service automation, etc. These features shall help our existing customers as well as on the new customer acquisitions.
On the business front, our recent partnerships and association with tier-1 system integrators (SI) and other channel partners are helping us to reach out to more customers. We are constantly seeking to expand this for larger reach nationally, and we are also in the process of expanding in South-east Asia, Middle East and Africa regions. We want to be among the top 2 products of choice in the midscale range in the markets we operate. Our expansion activities are happening towards achieving that goal.
We have also strengthened the cloud offering. Our new offering Sapphire BizOne is getting launched to cater to SME’s business operations management needs. Early feedback is extremely positive and we are looking forward to make a very strong impact and achieve exponential growth through this. (Audio)
Your advice to new entrepreneurs.
It is a fantastic journey and welcome to the new world. It shall be filled with unknowns all the time and it will be an unforgettable journey with wealth of experience. It can be long and tiresome. Be prepared to navigate through it as it can be lonely at times. Strong personal pledge and commitment is the key as you have to face the challenges. A strong team is essential. Build a trusted team that believes in you to be part of your venture. Ensure adequate financial backing or funding is available. Lack of it can restrict your progress and can force the directional change itself. Good to do the right groundwork before you begin the execution. (Audio)
About Shafi Ahamed
Shafi Ahamed is CEO of Tecknodreams, a software product company which is the manufacturer of SapphireIMS. SapphireIMS (www.sapphireims.com) is an IT management tool targeted at the SMB segment and being used by more than 120 organisations in India, many of them in the manufacturing industry. Shafi Ahamed has over 16 years of software industry experience. In the early part of his career he was with Hewlett Packard working in R&D, support and consulting. He has strong technology and consulting expertise in development of network/IT management products, networking and communications. He cofounded Tecknodreams in 2002 and has since grown and transformed it from services into a product company.
