Given the rise of tablet/mobile usage in the enterprise teams (especially sales force), CloudPact has a big opportunity ahead. Highly driven and passionate tech entrepreneur, Vignesh Swaminathan, one of the founders of CloudPact, is sharing the success story of their Mobile Enterprise Application Platform for the Indian Market. (Edited Excerpts):
Where are you based? How big is CloudPact team?
We are based in Hyderabad, presently we are now a team of 12 and slowly growing.
What was the influential factor in establishing your company?
I was initially in the software industry and in the process of 10 years I slowly got into administration side from being a programmer, during my time in that department I acknowledged that there were lack of Enterprise applications due to which there was lot of ambiguity in decisions and time consumption. As you know that time is money in today’s world and so, in order to reduce that wastage I along with my co-founders got an idea to start a new company which would help organizations do their work more efficiently and quickly.
Decision making made mobile; Can you tell us in detail how you enable this using CloudPact?
Any enterprise is as agile as its ability to take decisions and execute them quickly. Mobile enterprise workers have always had the problem of being away from their enterprise system when they are on the road. Here comes the use of our software i.e. Mowbly which solves this problem by giving you the complete task flow capabilities to help your mobile workforce stay connected to your enterprise.
Vignesh, can you tell us about the technology used to build the platform?
We had to create a new website and store its whole information in our database and which we thought would be more time consuming and costly, so in order to decrease those difficulties we thought of using Google App Engine which offers user the ability to build and host web applications on Google Infrastructure. For the mobile run-time we use device specific technologies as there are no alternatives.
Please tell us in detail about the features and benefits of using CloudPact software.
CloudPact helps its customers to achieve enterprise mobility using their existing IT team through a unique solution which decreases the turnaround time by as much as 75%. It is an enterprise app publisher coupled with a powerful Cloud based IDE with complete team development support.
Features of cross platform mobile app are:
Task flows to enable quick decision making with states and escalation built in.
Native mobile UI widgets: CloudPact provides out-of-box mobile UI look and feel, window task management and a full set of mobile UI widgets to help your team deliver the right mobile UI experience for your users.
Device integrated widgets to leverage phone features such as camera, contacts, file system etc.
Flight mode smart to ensure users can conduct business irrespective of their mobile connection.
The key here is the ability to deal with the fact that mobile workers need not necessarily always be online. They might be on a flight or the data connectivity can drop, then it is not possible to connect to enterprise systems. They should be able to get their work done in spite of these situations. CloudPact makes this possible by giving you hassle free offline data support which allows offline transactions and automatic data synchronization, when the user comes online.
Secure around the clock with data protection, secure connections and remote data wipe.
Window task management to make mobile app development easy and productive.
Smooth enterprise connectivity.
CloudPact helps enterprise programmers to connect to their enterprise systems using standard web service technology by providing the right tools to achieve web service connectivity.
Cloud Development environment with complete DTP application life cycle management and team development.
CloudPact comes enabled with complete app life cycle management across development, testing and production deployment. Each cloud developer is able to work in a completely isolated DTP environment as an individual developer, for an integrated test environment and finally for production deployment.
Tell us about the native mobile UI widgets that you offer.
We offer a range of native mobile UI widgets, the primary among them are the contact widget (binds enterprise data to phone contacts, adds, calls, messages, emails them on demand), the camera widget (binds the phone’s camera to shoot and transfer image data in business transactions), the attachment widget (binds the phone’s file system to attach files and images in business transactions), the location tracker (binds the phone’s location to business transactions, uses GPS, Network triangulation or wifi hotspot to determined location). Other than this, we have API’s covering Contacts, Files, Database, Location, Messaging, Camera etc.
What is on-premise enterprise & Cloud models & how do they differ?
CloudPact offers two models of deployment, the on-premise enterprise model (Empact model) and the cloud model. The essential difference between these two models is where the development, deployment and administration of the published apps resides. The complete stack runs out of the CloudPact infrastructure in the cloud model, and inside the enterprise IT infrastructure in the enterprise model. The cloud model is based on user license and the enterprise model is based on server license.
How many users have signed up for the free trail? How has the response been so far?
We have more than 500 users presently using our community edition. Launched in late April 2013.
We have started increasing our marketing pace since last year and with every campaign we are adding a few more users. We are holding back from completely throwing open the platform, as CloudPact focuses more on enterprise apps. We will do that under a different brand name targeting apps in the consumer space soon.
Which kind of companies can implement your application for their uses?
Our product can be used in various industries such as automotive, telecom, construction, banking, sales force, healthcare and many more. For details in depth and how you can implement these can be seen here http://www.mowbly.com/enterprise-mobility-solutions.
Can you tell us about some of the apps that have already been built using CloudPact?
As of today we have developed apps in the manufacturing, banking and GIS space. All these engagements are for the on-premise enterprise license.
How does the pricing model work?
ð For individuals, there is the community edition, all the development features and tools are available for free. The projects will be visible to everyone in the community. The pricing comes in when the individuals want to have a number of private projects.
ð For and enterprise, all development, deployment, analytic and monitoring features and tools are available with support. The subscription license is based on the number of user the project is targeted towards. For more details you can see this http://www.mowbly.com/#pricing.
How big is the Mobile Enterprise Application Platform market?
Mobile Enterprise Application Platform market quite huge and as of now it’s over $5 billion worldwide.
What is the amount of market share your company is holding right now in the industry?
Slowly and steadily we are increasing our market share and presently doing projects nearby i.e. Hyderabad, as of now we are holding a fair amount of market share even though we are startups and I can assure you that in the days to come we definitely have bright future.
Can you tell about partners work in helping your organization?
We have strategic partnerships with other providers. Collaborating with them has helped us reach wider viewpoints which is helping us gain more and more market.
How do plan to market CloudPact going forward?
We will kick off our full steamed marketing campaign after gaining initial customer traction. Currently, we are making our presence in key mobile events around India. We are focused on gaining word of mouth publicity by establishing customers in key verticals.
What are the biggest challenges you face as one of the early players in this space and who are your counterparts in this space?
The key challenges that we face today are visibility, awareness and outreach. In India there are many challengers but most important of them all is IBM.
Can you tell us few awards/accolades your company has received so far?
We have numerous accolades in our industry and peers.
We have been recognized as one of top five cloud startups out of 110 participants in Cloud Conclave 2011 awarded by Dr.Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon.com.
One of the Top 8 Companies of India to participate in the CIO Strategy Exchange showcase organized by Product Nation.
Appnomy 2011 organized by PluggedIn adjudged Cloudpact as one of the top 10 mobile apps of the year.
image : Cloudpact team along with members who visited their company