Existing enterprise software had originated over 20 years back that has been purely transaction oriented. Currently, the enterprise software is a drawback, as it is unable to meet major needs like data driven decision making, and enhanced customer engagement to name a few. With the advent of advanced technology like cloud, tablets and mobility, which are based on completely different IT architecture, when implemented have resulted in enhanced customer engagement, competitive intelligence and enabled data driven decision making. This is proving very beneficial for all sectors.
In India, the IT investments in sectors like retail, healthcare, manufacturing, financial services and SMBs are on an average one percent, but it needs to catch up to five percent as companies scale up. In healthcare domain, investments need to be scaled up to three percent from the current one which is even low than one percent so as to enhance efficiency and customer satisfaction. We at Norwest Venture Partners (NVP) focuses on investing in technologies like SaaS/Analytics/ Customer Engagement in verticals like retail, healthcare, education and financial services.

A New Wave of Medical Technologies
Some of the latest areas that I am following are in personalized medicine, medical technology and intelligent robots. This is the next frontier where a lot of new companies are being formed, which will be extending human life through a combination of genetics, personalized medicine and stem cell technology. Medical Science was left unexplored technologically and there are huge possibilities for technology to grow. There are efforts to create software and CPUs that will mimic human brain functions. They are radically different from current generation of software which is more linear and sequential in nature. Human part replication, neural computing and intelligent robots will become full-fledged reality in coming years.

Advice for Budding Entrepreneurs
My foremost advice to the emerging entrepreneurs will be to build a demo prototype to test your hypothesis quickly. The most important step would be to get few beta customers and validate your hypothesis, and understand the economics of acquiring your customers. It is probably the best time to create the next generation software application companies. There are plenty of opportunities where innovation can be done by emerging startups. (As told to Jisha Unni)