Proteans Continuing the Stride in Product Development Date:   Wednesday , September 30, 2009 A top technology company in Scandinavia listed on Oslo Stock Exchange has a dominant position in the public sector space; and the largest oil and gas, shipping, construction and real estate, and financial firms in the Nordic region are its customers. To extend its leadership in Europe and accelerate its business growth, the company was looking to scale its software engineering capabilities. With limited access to talent in the Nordic region, it looked to outsourcing firms, and evaluated some of the largest Global IT Services firms along with some niche firms in India and Eastern Europe. Their ideal engineering partner would have deep technical expertise, process excellence, world-class talent, and integrity. After multiple rounds of rigorous onsite evaluation, it selected a fast growing Indian company with complete focus on Software Product Development, extraordinary talent, great work culture, and deep technical expertise. This company is Proteans Software Solutions; a Bangalore based outsourced product development company. Started in 2003, by Sudhakar Gorti, and his three friends from IIT, Prashant Singh, Nilesh Patel, and Neelam Dwivedi, Proteans provides software product development services to ISVs, SaaS companies, Internet businesses, and software R&D organizations of Global 1000 companies. “In late 2002 and early 2003 we had observed a shift in the Indian outsourcing industry. Companies in the U.S. had realized the technical capabilities of Indian engineers, and instead of outsourcing mundane back office work, they were eyeing talent for product development. All four of us had been working in product development for a long time in startups and MNCs till then. Always wanting to start a business of our own, we gave up our plush life and plunged into the wave of product development outsourcing,” explains Gorti, CEO, Proteans Software. Since inception, the focus at Proteans has been product engineering. The first customer it acquired was a startup product company. The Atlanta based startup working in CRM space was looking for a partner to help them build their products. There were not many companies at that time that had pure focus on product development. Proteans took up the challenge and started working with the startup. Over a period of time it built close to 20 products and helped the startup release all of them in the market. The startup grew from a one-person organization to one of the most successful companies in the Microsoft CRM space and was eventually acquired by a NASDAQ listed company. Proteans’ focus on product engineering as a service has been providing a great edge to its customers over traditional IT services outsourcing players. Unlike most outsourcing companies, Proteans aligns itself to its customers’ business needs. From creating an extended R&D team for top ISVs to deploying complex enterprise software in the world’s biggest banks, or addressing the unique engineering challenges of customers in performance, usability, and test automation, Proteans provides great flexibility in engagement models that suit customer needs. “We create extended R&D arms for several mid-sized and large product companies. They can rely on us for addressing specific product development needs, and engaging with us helps them release products faster and cut their engineering costs by 25-40 percent. They see our team as highly capable and as competent as their own team,” Gorti explains. One of the customers it is engaged with is a global leader in asset performance management solutions, and it services world’s largest oil and gas and chemical companies. In the last two years Proteans has helped it build software for the end customers to track the performance and reliability of their plant and machinery. In the course of time, Proteans also set up close to 35 ODCs for it has done extensive product development and testing and successfully released several versions of the product. Proteans has been focused on banking, public sector, education, retail, and distribution verticals; and in terms of horizontals, Proteans is a key player in ERP, CRM, ECM, and Collaboration. Though it primarily works on Microsoft technologies, Proteans is actively developing capabilities in Java and Adobe platforms. In the last six years it has worked with close to 75 product companies worldwide, helping them with different R&D services like architecture, design, development, testing, performance engineering, and more, resulting in many a success story. One such example is a U.S. company, which was in the early stages of building a platform for the food service industry in the U.S. so that the consumers could order online. Proteans built the entire platform and today it is the most successful online ordering platform in the U.S. Several leading food chains such as Subway, Moes, Baja Fresh, and others use it so that customers can order food online anywhere in the U.S. Today, Proteans boasts of substantial presence in the U.S., which attributes to 80 percent of its revenue. The U.K., Scandinavia, and India are other geographies it is actively expanding its base in. “Growing business has always been a challenge but we have taken every problem in a positive stride,” says Gorti. “The outsourcing industry is highly competitive and our niche segment is offering OPD services. We face competition from other OPD players, especially in markets such as China, India, and East European Countries,” he explains. This is where focusing on certain geographies like Scandinavia, where not many players are present, has helped the company. Proteans has gained tremendous recognition from NASSCOM, Red Herring, Global Outsourcing List, and SoftwareMag.com. It has also been named as one of the fastest growing companies in India and the APAC region by Deloitte for the last two years. Proteans has been growing at a phenomenal rate over the last few years. But the growth in the current year has been moderate due to the impact of the economic recession. Gorti and his team took maximum advantage of the downturn to evaluate the company’s offerings and revamped several of its processes. While some companies were cutting costs on sales and marketing, Proteans actually doubled its spend on sales and marketing. This has helped Proteans position itself better and now that the things are looking bright, it is back on a customer acquisition spree. The key challenge in OPD business is talent acquisition and retaining. At present, the company has close to 300 people working in its three development centers in Bangalore. The company leadership works very hard in building a solid platform for engaging, motivating, and developing talent, where employees get a lot of opportunities to learn and grow. This helps us in attracting and retaining the top talent,” says Gorti. Looking at the future, Proteans is exploring avenues in Indian and other emerging geographies. The Indian market has been growing exponentially and with more product development happening in India the company sees more business opportunities. “We had not focused on Indian market in the initial 3-4 years, but in the last year or so we have been seeing a lot of opportunities. Since we are based in India, it always helps being nearer to the customers,” he says. Many product companies that had earlier set up centers in India are now seeing outsourcing as the preferred option due to the rising cost of operations and overheads in India. Also, keeping up with the latest trends like SaaS and cloud computing is a challenge. In such a scenario, working with a specialized vendor helps them and this in turn opens up opportunities galore for companies like Proteans who continue to set new standards in product development.