Winds Online: Carving out a niche for itself Date:   Tuesday , March 02, 2010 It was in May 2004 that four friends Sumesh K Menon, Biju K, Jayachandran KS and Sujith decided to reunite and realize their college dream – to build an online business from scratch. After overcoming several hiccups and challenges, from having absolutely no mentors to getting no help from VCs, their dream finally materialized, when Winds Online was founded. A next generation business application development company, Winds Online delivers internet based services of any complexity to clients worldwide. It started out as just like any other web designing and multimedia company, offering custom website design, and within two years became a web application development firm. More importantly, today this private limited firm handles On-demand business application product and solution development. “To become a globally recognized organization providing e-business solutions for small and medium enterprises: this is our vision and we take pride in living up to it,” says Sumesh Menon, CEO of Winds Online. And more than anything else, it is the ccontribution of its current team in pursuing the common vision, which helped Winds Online to reach its current situation. The fact that, the company handles projects from all over the world including France and the Middle East, and with only 16 employees, it has already managed 400 projects to date, speaks volumes. You might just pause and say, “So what’s new? There are several players providing the very same solutions!” But the very fact that Winds Online has sustained itself in a growing market and a “Holistic Approach on Customer Management” makes it stand apart. The company does not have a marketing team, but it continues to climb the ladder of success through client referrals. Take for instance Procopi, one of the leading designers and manufacturers of Swimming pool equipments in France. Procopi was in need of a system where they can integrate the whole process of product ordering and internal document management to be made online. Given the company’s record of offering business domain knowledge with technology competence and proven methodologies to deliver quality results in a cost-effective manner, Winds Online was an obvious choice. Winds Online developed for them a comprehensive web based environment built on LAMP platform, which will help Procopi to scale up to any extent in the future. After a thorough system study, it developed a system on which different user types can be configured on a predetermined business rule and can login to the system. Additionally, a Web Administration control panel was created for better management of the entire website. Among the array of products that it develops today are Winds SFA and Winds CRM. Winds CRM is being offered under SaaS model, which just about any organization from a five member team to a 500 member team can use with a minimal subscription charge. “In fact, sales force automation, one of the integral part of Winds CRM, is vital in industry verticals where the direct field sales force tends to be high and account management is important,” adds Sumesh. Today, the company’s unique proposition lies in its approach to each project. As Sumesh puts it, “We concentrate on providing both aesthetic as well as technical value to our customers.” The idea is to provide to the small and medium enterprises, the same quality services that large organizations enjoy with millions of dollars of investment. Proudly enough, the company is living up to its goal. What with plans to grow into a 40 member team in the coming year, and expand from its three offices in India to having offices in Canada and the Middle East, Winds Online is all set to become a niche player in the field.