Pune based InnovizeTech Software is an exciting new player in India’s emerging software product story. Their patent-pending and award-winning cloud-based solution, Sapience, enables enterprises to achieve significant gains in work output – effortlessly.
InnovizeTech has been founded by four serial entrepreneurs, with a strong product DNA, and 100+ years of combined experience of technology and management at global software companies. Their previous two ventures had successful exits to VERITAS Software (now Symantec Inc.) and Symphony Services Inc. Thereafter they scaled both subsidiaries to high revenue and over 700 employees in 3.5 years each.
We spoke to Shirish Deodhar, Co-Founder and CEO, about Sapience.
Can you tell us more about Sapience?
Sapience is a US and India patent pending solution with no equivalent today, which helps companies to increase work output by 15-20%. This has a transformational impact on delivery capability, revenue and profitability, especially since it can be achieved without any change in process or additional management overhead.
Sapience’s key USP is that it delivers automated Work Visibility. It intelligently sources individual work time on activities and projects, which is then aggregated as per the organization hierarchy. Sapience delivers actionable advisories to individual employees and managers, through which work output can be enhanced at every level.
How did the idea for Sapience come about?
After founding and building two ventures in IT services space, we decided that the future belonged to companies that create IP. While brainstorming on product ideas, we reflected back on our experience. The biggest change as we scaled the business from the first 40-50 employees to 700+ had been the diminishing visibility into how teams were performing, with more management layers being added. When employees do most of their work on PCs, and the work is highly diverse, it is hard to determine work output. Flexi work timings, work from home policies, globally distributed teams, contractors and outsourcing makes this challenge even more acute.
Increasing competition, rising salary and other costs, and changing business models from Time & Material to fixed cost and service level based pricing, are making it critical for Indian companies to raise productivity at work. You can only improve what you measure. That’s what we set out to do.
What are the specific benefits of Sapience?
The product’s fundamental value is to deliver automated Work Visibility. This results in higher Work Output at all levels. Why? Because you now have facts with which you can initiate self-improvement. Instead of raw data about time utilization at work, Sapience delivers meaningful information.
Besides the revenue/profit gain that will transform the business, here are a few benefits for various stakeholders:
- For employees, Sapience is like a ‘mirror’ to their work. They can ensure better focus on core activities. Those working long hours can improve their work-life balance.
- Team leads and project managers get the ‘big picture’ – like the average work time per person, key activities and applications. They don’t need to look at individual data. Instead, by reviewing these trends with the team, they can set improvement goals and let each person work towards them.
- Senior management get the ‘macro view’ – which teams are under-utilized and which have excess work, with which they can optimize staffing. Delivery becomes more predictable and future estimation improves by the ability to get exact effort on projects and business units.
What are your key challenges?
Curiously, our biggest challenge arises out of our product’s biggest strength.
Sapience is an innovative new idea that has no equivalent globally. That is why we filed patents in the US and India. It solves a real problem, and has direct impact on company financials. When we make our sales pitch, it isn’t that we are selling an advanced or cheaper version of an existing product. It is a fresh concept with no comparison point. CxOs/VPs recognize its value instantly, but want to build consensus in the company first. People who hear about it second hand compare it with employee monitoring tools, which Sapience is not.
In effect we are creating a new market. We are weaving our product positioning, sales pitch and overall messaging to highlight the business value, and by asking companies to test drive the product for one month. Once they do, they usually end up buying it.
What about funding?
We were fortunate to get $350K in funding from Indian Angel Network in June 2010, even before we had initiated sales. This has helped bring us to a stage where the product is shipping and we have paying customers. Since our product is unique, we need to build on our first mover advantage by establishing ourselves in the market and widening the technology lead. We are talking to investors, and hope to close a Series A round soon.
What is your pricing model and current sales status?
Our solution is cloud based with annual per-user subscription. We also offer an on-premise option and permanent per-user license for enterprises that are averse to having their data in the cloud.
In 2010, we had a beta version of the product and few early adopters like IDeaS (a subsidiary of SAS) and Excelize. We started selling actively in early 2011, and already have 40+ installations and over 3000 users. About half of these are customers, while the others are in pilot mode. Customers range from large and medium IT services firms (Zensar, Infobeans), to subsidiaries of global ISVs (IDeaS), engineering services companies (Excelize, EnVenture), and Indian product companies (Bio-analytical Technologies, GSG).
What is your future growth strategy?
We are following an ‘Expanding Web’ strategy in multiple dimensions:
- Product Functionality – we are building on our first mover advantage to become the standard for Work Visibility. We intend to cover all platforms including smartphones, iPad, and integrate with key applications.
- Market – the product is useful to any company where employees use PCs extensively. Our present focus is on IT services, Product ISVs (local or subs), Engineering services, and KPOs.
- Geography – we did our initial selling in Pune and Mumbai, and have now expanded to other Indian metros. We intend to sell to US companies who are outsourcing globally in the later part of 2012.
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