Sangeeta Patni, cofounder and President of Extensio Software, is in product technology space for more than 22 years. You have to have some sort of a “distorted” view of the world, a characteristic attributed to Steve Jobs. It takes a lot of self-belief, courage, and innovative mindset to stay on in products when you see services growing into multimillion dollar businesses. Sangeeta does not believe in services, to put it simply. She values the power of originality and thinking and an engineer’s mind is best utilized in products, in her view.
Sangeeta holds a Masters in Electronics and Control from BITS, Pilani. After a stint in the corporate world for several years, with companies such as Hindustan Lever and Eicher Motors, where she built control systems for chemical plants, created IT departments, implemented large-scale software projects and led strategic business process re-engineering efforts, she began her entrepreneurial journey in 2000, when she left her plum position as a Chief Information Officer of Eicher Motors, to create Extensio Software, a company based out of United States, with its development center in Nagpur.
In Extensio, she has created a technology company that has built world-class enterprise software products for globally renowned companies such as Johnson and Johnson and AstraZeneca. She built the company from grounds up, and under her leadership, her company Extensio and its young team of engineers in Nagpur have built market leadership for its patented information delivery products within the Indian region. The Extensio team, despite its small size, has partnered with industry heavy weights such as SAP, IBM and webMethods, and in India, and with large corporations such as Reliance Communication and Hutch, to bring unique innovative software products to enterprises, within and outside India.
Sangeeta is actively involved with NASSCOM and helped put together the CIO Showcase at the Product Conclave in 2009. Enarmoured by the impact of the showcase, this year she is planning to take it to the next level by inviting CIOs from outside India.
She holds strong views (not sure if they are weakly held, as Sharad Sharma would say), a characteristic trait of product entrepreneurs. She shares her entrepreneurial journey and what to expect from NASSCOM Product Conclave this year in a chat with Venkatesh Krishnamoorthy, chief evangelist, YourStory.
Journey as a product entrepreneur (Part 1)
YourStory: Can you take us through your journey as a product entrepreneur?
Sangeeta Patni: We started the entrepreneurial venture Extensio in the year 2000, right in the middle of the dotcom bubble. Previous to Extensio, I have been in the IT managerial world for almost 17 years. I have worked with paid sector for a while, then I have worked with Hindustan Lever for almost 5 years, I was a Chief Information Officer for Eicher motors for 7 years before I quit. The reason I quit was because I strongly believed that in my role as an IT manager the transformative impact of IT was not really being harnessed in enterprises especially because they would look at IT as a service provider for them. Most IT organizations had CIOs only to manage the chain but they could not take innovation steps, even if they could see the technology taking the business to the next level. That continues to be how it is today. I found myself getting bored with just doing operational stuff.
Those were the early days of enterprise, so I guess the role as a CIO was not completely explored. I did fairly challenging stuffs at Unilever and other places I had worked at leadership position early in my career, but the CIO role was not getting me anywhere. I realized I had to break loose. I was 35 then. I knew I had the right experience and if I didn’t take the plunge then, I knew I would be able to do any later. Extensio was founded by me and my elder brother. He was a pure technology guy based in US. He also believed that the day had come to build a pure technology company. So, I handled the technology part of the entire operations. My job was to set up the technology part of the Indian operations. So we set the operations in Nagpur. Strange, why Nagpur, but Bipin, my co-founder, believed in the market. India is short changing our technology capabilities, so there is bit of a hatred that my co-founder and I share. It never made sense to us. What is the point of doing contracting kind of work when you can build innovative stuff and sell it to the market?
Though I think it was bit of dare at that time, it took a while a build a product and then we had the dotcom bust. The company was formulated to create a content aggregation kind of platform. Instant access to information within the use of content and that is how the company was created. Those days you had to either do a TCS. But, since I was from a technology background, I found myself bored. We had to completely redo the company strategy. We focused on the content market. How do you create value information based on wherever you are? We provide in-context delivery information from wherever you are. This was received very well; we realized that the real challenge was marketing. IT managers in India are very brand conscious. CIOs were very reluctant to look at Indian origin companies. They were ready to pay huge amount of money to IBM or Microsoft but they would not like to invest in competitive technologies made available in India. This continues to be the challenge even today.
Indian market is not half as innovative as CIO counterparts in the west. We tried to build this awareness among community and I continue to do that. We have managed to sell to companies today against IBM and the like. We have brought innovations. But some CIOs are willing to stick their necks out for Indian companies today. This wasn’t true until 3-4 years back. For two reasons: a country like India needs innovation; and differential price points. Large companies do not have that kind of offering specialized to cater to the Indian market. Everybody today has a rural strategy and the bottom of the pyramid is taking a pivotal role. My primary market is the enterprise market, though the going is tough but the last few years have been successful. Some of our customers are taking us to their global counterparts in the world.
Funding the company and starting in a Tier II city (Part 2)
Customers and pricing (Part 3)
Sangeeta’s role at the Product Conclave (Part 4)
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