point
The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.

August - 2007 - issue > Cover Story

Aditi: Designing Dreams

Aritra Bhattacharya
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
Aritra Bhattacharya
Pradeep Singh, Founder and CEO of Aditi Technologies, is ready to take on the world in a relatively young market—the outsourced product development (OPD) market. “The OPD industry is highly promising. We are already seeing a great momentum in this industry,” says Singh.

Unlike in the IT services industry, where end-user companies offshore work in order to cut costs, in the OPD industry it’s all about time to market as companies build products. Cost becomes the primary driver for outsourcing corporate IT. However, for software businesses it’s very simple - if they don’t innovate and be the first to get to the market, competition will get them “And it is this fundamental difference that Aditi bets on, as it changes the very characteristics of the game,” says Singh.

Having spent nine years in various management positions at Microsoft and seen success in his own entrepreneurial venture—Talisma, a CRM software product company, Singh knows what it takes to build world-class products and teams for global software businesses.

For instance, an IT services player requires fewer experienced people but a larger base of engineers with little or no experience. The composition of the team in a product company is very different. The operating pyramid is much narrower, with less number of people, all of them with rich experience in building and shipping products. And that’s exactly how teams in Aditi have been structured. Betting on the narrow pyramid fosters innovation—a crucial element to build products at Aditi.

Singh avers that the real glamour lies in developing products, and it is more so in the case of Aditi since it entails working for some of the marquee customers whose businesses are time and market critical. “The slope of talent versus compensation is the steepest in product development firms, meaning if you are competent your compensation as well as position in the company rises very fast,” says Singh. Chetan L Shinde, Vice President – People Department, shares the example of an employee who had joined the company fresh out of college last year, and is currently based at the company’s U.S. headquarters in Seattle, evangelizing clients on what sort of specifications to include in future releases, and how to make current products migrate to new platforms. This is just one of the numerous such cases in the company.


Share on Twitter
Share on LinkedIn
Share on facebook