KritiKal Solutions Creations for Tomorrow Date:   Thursday , May 06, 2010 The worst fears of a Scorpio car owner in Delhi came true when he found his car missing from the parking. Thankfully, he had installed vehicle security and alarm system designed by KritiKal Solutions in the car, which makes the car send an SMS to the owner on detecting intrusion. The car was later traced by police in a location in Haryana. The product has been installed in approximately 3,000 cars in the market and has helped in recovering about 15 stolen cars so far. KritiKal Solution’s another product for the security market, KLiPR (an automated license plate recognition system) has seen very wide acceptance across the country since its commercial introduction one and a half years ago. It has been honored twice, once by NASSCOM in 2009 and again by Indian Semiconductor Association in 2010. KritiKal Solutions was founded in 2002 by seven graduating students and five professors from the Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT-Delhi, which has now managed to increase its strength to about 100 employees, forming a group of two companies. Jatin Sharma, CEO and Co-founder of KritiKal Solutions, says that there were three points that were the driving force behind starting the company. These three points were to create technology for future applications; to build on the R&D expertise available in the country for complete product design and development for the global market; and to bridge the technology gap between the academia and the industry. Today, KritiKal has a diversified product portfolio and solutions in domains including networking and telecom, security and surveillance, and traffic and transportation. KritiKal has been mainly focused in engineering design services in the fields of embedded systems and computer imaging. Over the past eight years, KritiKal has developed quite an interesting product portfolio and IP offerings as well. The latest addition to KritiKal’s products is Okapi, which is a revolutionary network operating system, which combines the features, performance, and reliability of an enterprise-class router, firewall, and VPN with the cost savings and flexibility of open source solutions. KritiKal will soon be launching an IP based Web conferencing solution called QuicKonnect. QuicKonnect is a next generation cross-platform audio and video conferencing solution that enables customers to share information and ideas and increase productivity while reducing costs incurred by conventional modes of communication. The company brings to the table end-to-end product design experience (from concept to production). It has expertise in all the stages of a product development right from defining the problem statement to delivering the fully tested prototypes. Their expertise is not limited to software development or hardware development alone, but it includes design and implementation of complex algorithms in the fields including computer vision and cryptography. The founders of the company are quite satisfied with the 50 percent growth in the 2009-2010 fiscal and the 100 percent growth in international business despite a global slowdown. “The entrepreneurial experience has been extremely rewarding. It’s been a phenomenal journey, starting as an incubation idea eight years ago to a company with about 100 employees,” says Sharma. KritiKal has aggressive plans to expand its outsourced product design services operations in India as well as in the international market. “We aim at achieving 100 percent year-on-year growth in outsourced product development services business, and are also aiming at an explosive growth through our products and IP offerings,” a confident Sharma says.