Interworld Commnet
India, with more than 680 million mobile connections, is now only behind China in this regard. According to a forecast by Informa Telecoms & Media, the number of active mobile subscriptions in India will touch 1.159 billion by the end of 2013, making it the world’s largest mobile market overtaking China. Interworld Commnet which had its inception in 1998 entered the mobile world in 2007, and is today one of the leading web and mobile app development company in the country.
In a short span, the company has mastered in mobile application development including iPhone Applications, Windows Mobile Applications, and Applications on Google Android for the niche markets. Its technology leverages J2EE, J2ME, Personal Java, CORBA, and .Net in order to provide mobile applications at attractive costs and on time without any compromise in quality. Its mobile application development capabilities includes adding a mobile device interface to existing applications, augmenting mobile application infrastructure with a location-based service component, mobile-enable existing enterprise applications, test mobile applications, SyncML-based synchronization of data between mobile devices and enterprise applications, and mobile-enabled company alerting and notification services.
CEO
But despite its proven prowess, the company is facing challenges in setting a stable foothold in the market. Not far after the company opened into the mobile apps market the global business world was hit by recession. This was a severe setback for the company as they had to bring down the price of their apps to attract customers during this period. “We brought down the price and lowered our margins and now even after the recession the customers are not ready to go back to the old price. So it seems recession is not over for us. The tech investments have gone up but the profitability is yet to match up,” says J K Menon, CEO, Interworld Commnet. “We have certain plans set in place for the next couple of years and these will boost our profitability by 100 percent.” he added. The company understands the business marketplace, current trends and issues it faces, which is a critical element of marketing any company and this makes the company highly effective in the space.
Menon feels that there is a scarcity in the availability of human resources in India. This scarcity is pushing companies to offer very large packages to new recruits and further reduce their profit margin. He says this lack of availability of talented people has to change in order for this industry to bloom further. Since its introduction into the mobile market the company has changed dynamically. It has hired several new managers and in terms of employee development has upgraded itself with social media, and now is among the very few companies in India who has done this. And the working culture is also different from similar companies. “Instead of asking our developers to do this and use this technology, we tell them that this is the need of the hour and ask them what they can do about it and they choose a suitable technology,” says Menon.
The company has developed partnership with crowd funding bodies and plans to use this for expansion purposes. It is presently focusing on Asian territory, and plans to expand into Malaysia, Singapore and Kuwait soon. “Indian market still remains to be our priority and we have plans to expand further into this territory,” explains Menon.
