The Cloud with a German name that will help enterprises
Entrepreneurship is a very diverse world. One can find any sort of people, and it is not surprising to find a broad variety of personalities and characters. Still, finding men who in their fifties and a family to support decide to leave their well-paid job to start up is always an interesting story. It draws attention to the importance of experience and knowledge in innovating the market.
Sudhir Prabhu and Rohan Joshi not only have long experience in finance and IT. During their career they explored markets in Europe, US, Latin America and South East Asia. They worked together at L&T Infotech for seven years and in 2011 they decided to start up Wolken.
“What drove us to start up is that nowadays it is very easy for consumers to do transactions. In hotels and shops, it is very easy for consumers to pay. Now it is a matter of time that enterprises ask for the same service. And they will be greater adopters!”
Wolken is the German word for “cloud”, so you can guess where their system is built on. Wolken provides an integrated service desk application that enterprise users can access via the internet to track and manage incidents, change requests, service requests and CMDB.
The international and diverse working environments that both Sudhir and Rohan experienced had a major role in creating the perfect network to start up. As Rohan puts it: “ When your product is at an idea stage, you need inputs from other companies and consultants in order to get more feature and to improve it. If you do not know well the people you are meeting, in most cases they will be polite enough to meet you but just to get rid of your requests as soon as possible. On the other hand, when you talk with people you have already met, they will take you more seriously.” Together, the Sudhir and Rohan knew more or less two hundred CEOs around the world. Not a bad start! So, off they went to North and West European countries, South America, Asia and the US. They personally collected data about market trends in virtually half the world.
Few months into the business and Wolken could already count three global costumers such as the Singapore-based Eastspring Investments, the Indian Onmobile, and AHI Carrier based in Dubai and Australia. These first three costumers very influential in defining the roadmap and the priorities of the company: “We don't do things because we like them.” Rohan argues “But because costumers want them.”
The market Wolken is operating in is a very crowded one. Big players such as IBM and BMC have dominated it for the past two decades and now control 70% of the business. The number one direct competitor of Wolken is ServiceNow, a US based new company. “Our aim is to find a place for ourselves in the market to challenge people like ServiceNow. We believe we are in a good position to do that, because what SN does is not increasing the platform, but is taking business from existing players. The market shares of these existing players are expected to reduce of about 50-70% in the next five years. So, now the challenge is about improving services.” The team has got some unique strength points which make Wolken a very flexible and easy-to-use product. For example, it is multi tenanted; it allows to set up multiple entities within a client; it has got an integrated chat; it is multi lingual; and it is easy to integrate. Moreover, Wolken offers its costumers the innovative possibility of paying according to what they use.
The team has also recently launched Fyiact, the “WhatsApp for entrepreneurs.” It allows any member of a team to communicate in real time in any place of the world. Fyact is an app for entrepreneurs, but meant for a more informal use than Wolken. It is the icing on the cake that can prove the adaptability of the team to different levels of action.
It is now time to look forward and the Wolken team is now thinking to go for venture funding. In these last years they have proved the validity of their product, they have several noteworthy costumers and their business model flows. “We need to scale now, and to scale we need money. For global extension.”
It is not easy to decide to start up when you are in your fifties, but opportunities are something we should create rather than waiting for them to reach us. “We will never be young again” Sudhir argues. This is true if you count the candles multiplying on your birthday cakes and your eye dioptres scaling down. But what Sudhir also points out is that the satisfaction of selling a product that you have created from scratch is a boost that really goes beyond age. Starting up is a matter of taking out the best of people, making them brave and lifting them up. Possibly on a wolken..sorry a cloud!
