NPC 2013 tells product entrepreneurs how to do; to feature regional rounds across India and go to the Valley

The Nasscom Product Conclave (NPC) in its 2013 edition focused on six themes (sales and marketing, global, payments, early stage, mobile, funding) and offered a good experience for those who sought to understand the product ecosystem. Perhaps the evolution of the product ecosystem to the “scale” level was understood by volunteer-organizers that there were as many as nine “hands-on” workshops on the opening day (October 28). “The previous editions focused on how to build products, how to raise money, and this edition is on how to do,” said Ravi Gururaj, Chairman of Nasscom Product Council, in his opening remarks. To signal a change, one extra day, in which workshops were held, has been added to the conference. Volunteerism remains the backbone of NPC although there has been a change in leadership. Ravi Gururaj, the new Product Council chairman, did not fail to recognize the efforts of Sharad Sharma, who is heading iSIPRT Foundation and former Nasscom Product Forum Chair, for generating momentum for NPC over the previous years.Krishnakumar Natarajan, Chairman of Nasscom, set an audacious goal for the product space in India and said companies built should be built in such a way to command one-fourth of the global market in any space they operate in. “The software industry will grow to $300 billion by 2020,” he said. He added that products will drive this growth. Sounding optimistic, he said there were enough exciting areas for growth but predicted that 80% of the growth will be incremental in nature. He sought to push the bar of NPC to the level of becoming the most admired industry association in the world. He pepped up the product entrepreneurs by saying, “The world looks to India as the hub of innovation.”

M.R. Rangaswamy, who was co-chairing the sessions, said the focus of this year’s NPC is on Made in India. There were sessions on how other industries such as automobile and health care is influencing the software industry. “SaaS has reached a tipping point,” he told the audience. Enterprise software and mobile are also other opportunity areas, in his view. Big data, the new emerging focus area of the product industry as a whole, was on focus on the third day of NPC.

Speaking to YourStory briefly, Ravi Gururaj said, “We did three things this year.” He emphasized that a lot of effort was done to bring both depth and breadth to the programmes this year. As a new initiative, NPC is set to travel to six cities in a regional round this year and will also go to Silicon Valley. “Instead of just gyan sessions, we also had on-field experience sessions,” Ravi added.

There were some interesting off-the-record sort of discussions such as Funny Techies featuring Krish Ashok and Ramesh Srivats, both known for humour and popular on social media for tickling many a funny bone, Startup Quiz to know the titbits of startups, and a session by Mahesh Muthy of Seed Fund, on how to travel around the world on a shoestring budget. In addition, there was a session on Introduction to Bitcoins, a crypto currency slowly gaining in popularity.