Mismatched partners often lead to broken or lingered marriage; this is no rocket science. And when you fail to find a partner yourself, you turn to matchmakers for the right fix. Acting as a fixer for technology buyers and sellers, MakeITDeals has delivered several successful stories that one can vouch upon. It acts vigilantly as a global online marketplace to link technology buyers and sellers, thus helping identify the right partnerships for clients' technology development, while enabling the partner community to reach global customer base. As a perfect search engine with Keyword Research, verified (by MakeITDeals analysts for their reliability & trustworthiness) and secured database of technology partners, and deals with the end-to-end business solution procurement process, MakeITDeals' global database organized by industry, business segment, solution type and other key selection criteria, enables the buyers to assess technology solutions that are available at the click of a button, and then reach the right providers meeting their business needs in the areas of hardware, business software products & solutions, technology products & solutions, and other related services.

Post a buyer zero-ins on a set of vendors with solutions that fits his business needs, MakeITDeals arms them with an automated platform to manage the procurement process. In addition to connecting the buyers and sellers and shortlisting vendors, the platform enables buyers to conduct vendor interviews and negotiations in a secured deal room, and finally award the contract. The platform's secured and seamless mechanism for both the clients and partners helps them collaborate to put together innovative solutions to complex business and training issues. This focus on collaboration (both between the partners and between the customers) places MakeITDeals par above its counterparts. The partners can collaborate to stitch their offerings together to design solutions to complex issues faced by the customers. On the flip side, the clients can also join forces to do collaborative research on future business issues or technology issues facing their industry.

The Unique Proposition

Witnessing dawn in end of 2012, MakeITDeals' actual product development commenced in the start of 2014. The gestation period was spent to determine product positioning in the market to address the right pain points of the buyers and sellers of technology solutions. "After much deliberation and consultation with several technology leaders in the Silicon Valley, we decided to focus more on creating a structured database organized by industry and industry segment, and a powerful search engine, rather than focusing on the functionality relating to deal processing," reminisces Arup Gupta, Chairman, MakeITDeals. While the product does have functionality to process the deal, it also has a well-defined interface to the Procure-to-Pay systems available in the market, especially the ones deployed in the cloud environment.

Arup has been in the industry for over three decades and have noticed challenges that customers in the US and Europe face when looking for specific solutions for their business needs. "Going through Google search and other analysts' report are time consuming and may not yield results," explains Arup. Hence he brought the global marketplace to one platform. But like every B2B marketplace, the company too faced initial crunch of seeding buyers and sellers, hence engaged with a marketing company to make calls and register clients & partners, post its launch. Though it saw initial success, both in terms of partners like Infosys, HCL and others, and clients like New York Life, Labcorp, IBM, SAP and more, the process was too expensive. MakeITDeals went back to drawing board in the middle of 2015 and are now coming out with its version 2.0 aimed at soliciting clients and partners, especially in the mid-market segment, to join the marketplace through digital promotion. But with India's B2C market gradually saturating, MakeITDeals will focus on B2B space to mint the growing opportunity.