It does not hurt to enter a crowded market place if you have the guts to compete. Deepak Singh sensed the opportunity for integrating various software applications while working for 3Com. He took no time in launching his company—Adeptia—and convincing the venture capitalists on how he would attack the market.

“The various integration products in the market were hard to use and required custom coding. This would mean long project cycles. Customers were looking for ease of use and shorter implementation cycles,” recalls Singh. This is where he could bridge the gap and win the customer mindset. Singh went a step ahead and combined business process management (BPM) with integration.

A BPM application monitors business processes, automates workflow or serves as an enterprise application integration (EAI) tool. These products can help identify areas of business that need to be automated, enforce business rules and even help integrate the existing IT infrastructure. “So our tool manages, automates and optimizes business process. That is where we can provide competitive advantage to our customers,” says Singh.

The Chicago, IL-based company is focusing on the mid-market space— companies having $100 million to $1 billion in revenues. Adeptia’s solution allows companies to leverage the Internet by deploying enterprise processes that link partners, suppliers and customers. Even business users can utilize workflow capabilities to interact with processes, view business information and make decisions all via a web-browser.

The India Story
With only $8 million of VC funding Singh had a tough job. “The funding we received was just not enough for us to develop the product we had in mind. We had to make sure that the we maximize the returns of whatever we invested.” He sensed the India opportunity and decided to build the product entirely in India. In 2000, there were hardly any product startups in India yet Singh believed in the India story.