With the rise of disposable income, urbanization and nuclear families, restaurants have transmuted into more than just a place to eat; causing the fine dining industry to grow at a rapid pace of 12 percent. But if you ask whether the restaurants, whose operations are innately intricate, from marketing to dining room management, are they abreast with this growth? The answer is 'No'. While most restaurants still use traditional paper-based reservation book & feedback mechanism, restaurants using technology wrestle with systems that are complicated to use, expensive to setup and precipitate high recurring costs. Always being in entrepreneurial mode, Ahmed Sharief (Founder, DineDesk) perceived this phenomenon during business lunches and decided to translate it into a business opportunity.

Investigating further, Ahmed heard grievances regarding operational & marketing issues in restaurants from a group of friends who were restaurant operators. Due to dearth of integration, the tools force restaurants to work with multiple vendors, learn many systems, often purchase special hardware, and remember endless passwords for diverse needs including reservations, operations, marketing, order taking, feedback and so on. "This made us think why not offer an 'Affordable' solution with 360o suite of tools, a solution that could assist in managing reservations to operations and feedback," Ahmed briefs the inception story behind DineDesk, a next generation, cloud based reservation, table management system and marketing platform for the restaurants.His resolve further strengthened when the research company he hired transpired appealing results.

Led by people with decades of experience in restaurant industry, DineDesk charted out its roadmap based unambiguously, which made it easy to understand the challenges, evaluate them and craft an efficient product that is easy to learn & use. DineDesk at several phases released the product to few beta customers, took their inputs and refined the product; thus decreasing the learning curve substantially. Today a restaurant staffer can learn it in minutes with very little help. The efficient use of DineDesk, made it possible for restaurants to be staff independent.Founded in April 2014 and launched beta version in October 2014, the Hyderabad headquartered company has already proved its worth by signing up close to 120 restaurants and partners across India, U.S., UAE, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore and Philippines within months.

Ahead of the Curve

While billion dollar players such as OpenTable are unable to expand to developing countries due to technology constraints and pricing model, DineDesk's current addressable market includes an exhaustive number of 2,90,000 restaurants that take reservations, engage in social media, or promote themselves online. "There is a worldwide demand for quality restaurant management software, and DineDesk is moving quickly to satisfy this demand in all corners of the world. We are pushing ahead in places like Singapore, Dubai, Thailand and South Africa, where our American competitors can't complete," asserts a determinedAhmed Sharief, Founder, DineDesk. Intuitive and easy to use, DineDesk's continuously evolving technology platform helps to manage and market a restaurant, encompassing every aspect of restaurant management withthe core features of Online Reservations, Table Management, Wait List Management, Guest CRM, Feedback, Marketing, Analytics and Statistics.