Since the launch of App Store by Apple, it’s been an inspiring episode for two dogged entrepreneurs, Vaideeswaran Sethuraman and his wife Sreelakshmi Vaideeswaran, who stumbled upon an idea to create a niche in the mobile application market and thus came up with the Divum Corporate Services in October 2008. Divum is a self-funded startup with a special focus on iPhone application development.

Having started as a two-person team, the Bangalore-based Divum has now grown up to an employee base of double-digit. “Thanks to our clients who believed us right from the first day, which allowed us to expand further to other platforms such as Blackberry, Symbian, and Android,” says Vaideeswaran. The company has explored multiple models both in service and IP development. Predominantly, Divum started as a service oriented company that enabled itself further to establish a portfolio across various domains. The company has developed about 50 apps in the last eight months in domains like gaming, business, LBS, education, maps, and entertainment. On the IP development front, we have begun with a ‘Fun-City’ series of games development and we already have a couple of games out in the market. In addition, the company has engaged with a couple of corporates on developing application on a revenue-sharing model, which will be out in Q1 2010 under the Divum brand. Recently, the company has also established a business development team in the UK under Orien 7 Technologies banner.

Having been an idea execution lab, where the ideas are converted into reality, the company claims that its strength lies in the values towards giving affordable, quick, quality output, which in turn helps the company to retain its clients. Having been fairly successful in this model with nearly 60 percent of the company’s revenue coming through its repeated clients, Vaideeswaran says, “Our client engagement model is lightweight and we keep the communication overhead to a bare minimum. That facilitates our overseas clients to work with us comfortably and at the same time it also augments our capacity to handle more global clients.”

Going beyond its limits to provide end-to-end service in developing complete solutions right from backend server programming to uploading the apps into App Store, the company claims to cater application development right from individuals to several corporate houses, universities, and so on. “In fact, we develop 25-30 percent of the applications for individuals, and that is the beauty of the mobile apps market, where anyone with a good idea can turn into a significant business,” explains Vaideeswaran. According to the company, some of its targeted customers are smartphone users like iPhone, BlackBerry, HTC, Samsung, and Nokia N-series.

However, establishing a convincing position in the market has never been a rosy expedition for Divum. What accentuates a challenge for the company is maintaining the expectations set by Apple and Google in terms of ‘user experience’, delivering quality app in a short-duration by a fresh team of engineers, and providing all time support to global clients across various time-zones. “Each app is unique and it caters to various domains like LBS, Gaming, Web-interface, 3D animations, Fitness calculations, Chatting, and Augmented reality and keeping up with these domains for every new app is a big challenge,” says Vaideeswaran. As part of its product strategy, the company is working towards having 100 plus applications developed in the first year and setting up multiple business units specifically for developing value-added applications with strategic partners under a common brand.