Launched in 2009, PromptCloud is where “Big Data is made Small”. PromptCloud operates on a Data as a Service (DaaS) model and primarily deals with large-scale “custom” data crawl and extraction. This simply means that they crawl the web (gather data from various sources on the web) for product reviews, blogs, social media, hotel/travel sites etc. and structure this data into XML, CSV etc. which can then be either used directly or processed further according as the requirements of their clients.

They crawl millions of pages and about a TB of data on a daily basis. They have provided more than 200 million reviews of products/hotels to clients across multiplre domains and multiple geographies like US (primarily), UK, Canada, Germany, Switzerland, India, Singapore, Spain, etc.

Based in Bangalore, PromptCloud was founded by Prashant Kumar. Prashant worked with Yahoo! after graduating from IIT-Kanpur with a dual B.Tech-M.Tech degree in Computer Science and before starting PromptCloud. Currently 6 people strong, the team also consists of alumni from IIT and CMU alumni. “I feel we have a good mix of business and technical acumen and we are just the right number to have ourselves occupied round the clock,” says Prashant, with a smile.

What differentiates PromptCloud is large-scale data (which is why they say Big Data made Small) on a customized basis. “There are many vendors who deal with data scraping or web crawling, but no one really offers this at a large-scale serving such high order of data needs. Other than this, our offering is customized for each client depending on data that they desire,” says Prashant.

They do both deep crawl which is one-time crawl of all past data on the site, as well as refresh crawl which means they provide data deltas as and when data refreshes on the site. “Since our offering is unique and we are currently in a niche market, we face near-zero competition in this space. The market mostly has vendors offering mass data crawling services with very little human touch. But sooner or later, we expect competition as technology barriers get lower and hence we want to establish ourselves as a brand in the DaaS space,” says Prashant.

Their business model is B2B and like other ‘AAS’ (As A Service) models, they have some initial cost and a recurring cost. “Other than this we also have certain one-time set up fees or template costs. Since each project is different, each one would need some setup before we can take off with the actual crawl and extraction. And due to the same reason, costs are never fixed and we offer our customers few knobs which they can tweak depending on the volume of sites and the frequency of data crawl. This model suits both big as well as small businesses and hence no constraints on the size of their pockets,” says Prashant.

Prashant believes that PromptCloud has a pretty big giant to feed in the market. “The reason being that our solution is vertical agnostic. So, anyone who’d like to get access to big data on the web and use it to gain a business advantage would be our target. We’ve already hit it right with e-commerce sites, review provider sites, businesses dealing with hotel and travel data and specifically market research firms. So as you can see we haven’t dived into a specific vertical but have kind of kept all doors open,” he says.

PromptCloud’s market strategy is mostly made up of targeted email marketing and inbound marketing for which they leverage social media. “Also a little amount of SEO just bolsters your image as a credible vendor. Referrals within a network and word of mouth suits us too since businesses with an urging need for data would only like to go with trusted vendors. And more or less, the number one marketing strategy is to make yourself as visible as possible since this effort never goes in vain, and people do remember you when that specific need arises in their businesses if you had made a decent first impression,” says Prashant.

Being one of the first few companies in this space, the challenges that PromptCloud faced were on two fronts – there was considerable technology barrier, but also, and more importantly for a business, they had to reach out to prospective clients and explain them the solution as to where they would fit in, in the whole eco-system. “I must concede however, that the technology barrier makes it easier to hire good people because they like challenges,” says Prashant.

Not too long ago, cloud computing technologies saw adoption only by SMEs due to the fact that they had business agility. Now, however, even the bigger players are shedding their inhibitions and coming in the foreground of cloud. “Another thing that we observe is increasing trend in DaaS after breakthroughs of SaaS and PaaS. This growing adoption is owing to the BigData world we live in these days. There’s so much data on the cloud and so much to explore with it. Both big and small players are fighting individual wars with Big Data analytics and technologies that could process big data in order to derive meaningful insights from data,” says Prashant.

PromptCloud is currently in the process of expanding to new verticals soon. “We aspire to be a one-stop shop for all data needs in a business and continue to be sole provider of large-scale data and custom analytics, while offering differentiation with respect to technology and our expertise. Although we’ve been successful in multiple verticals across geographies, Fortune 500’s could be the next big bite for us. We are one of the key players in the Big Data domain already and would like to continue staying ahead of the curve and keep adapting to the market dynamics,” says Prashant, signing off on a positive note.

Offering recruitment solutions to Indian startups and small businesses, Mumbai based entrepreneur, Jay Thaker tells us that his venture, SutraLite, is a low-cost fixed fee recruitment service that guarantees results. He claims that it’s a unique recruitment model that’s not been tried in India ever before. “Since ages, the recruitment industry has seen a typical commission based model and all recruitment activities are carried out around popular online job portals,” says Jay.

With SutraLite, they are trying to break that monotony and give a fresh look to recruitment. “We handle each recruitment assignment like a customized recruitment campaign,” says Jay.

What’s also unique is that this service is primarily for startups/small businesses.

Starting Out

Waqar Azmi founded Sutra Services Pvt. Ltd. and launched SutraHR. He has never worked as an employee under someone and started his first venture, an e-commerce idea, much before its time during his engineering days.

Jay started his career working with various startups. Ironically, he got placed at Burrp.com through SutraHR.  That’s where the two met and realized that they both shared a common passion for entrepreneurship. He then joined Sutra as a co-founder. Currently, they have a team of around 55 and are aiming to increase that number over the next 3 months.

In 2009, they had already been running an HR consultancy which helped build teams at some of the hottest new-age Indian startups like Snapdeal, Komli, Zapak.com, Yebhi.com, etc. All of these startups were in the dotcom and technology space. But they also realized that there are several other lesser known startups, small businesses and growing organizations with limited resources, which desperately need good talent. “These startups/small businesses are bogged down by problems related to recruitment like cost, speed, service quality and delivery guarantee,” says Jay. This prompted Jay and Waqar to think of a ‘compact, yet functional solution’ that is very affordable but does not compromise on quality.

They agree that although there’s no dearth of recruitment agencies in India, there was a clear lack of a reliable yet cost-effective recruitment service, which understood the needs of a startup/small business. That led them to start SutraLite.com.

Even before starting out, they had made enough connections with entrepreneurs, startup companies, small/medium businesses. As a test marketing tool, they used this network to validate the business model and gather feedback about the service before launching it. As part of this, they also offered the service on minimum costs as an incentive for people to give it a shot initially. “Our results were favorable and clients found our recruitment process quite effective,” says Jay. And that was enough for the duo to go ahead full throttle and launch this venture in early 2010.

So far, they have served over 700 startups and small businesses from around India, for various job roles and have run about 1200 job campaigns for these companies.  “We’ve helped companies hire at all levels, including receptionists, sales managers, merchandisers, graphic artists, web developers, finance heads, CTOs and co-founders too, the list is long!” says Jay.

Investment

Since they already had a profitable business (SutraHR) and existing infrastructure of relationships with job portals, candidates, databases, etc., they did not have to make any real investment or take any external financial assistance for this venture. They bootstrapped their way ahead and are currently growing at a fast pace. “Of course, we do plan to raise funds in the near future and use them for scaling our operations multi-fold,” says Waqar.

Competition

They believe that since they don’t know of any recruitment company with this business model, there’s no direct competition as such. However, they agree that their primary and biggest competition is the recruitment consultancies catering to the same market. Although their percentage fees eventually turns out much higher than their fee.

Scope

SutraLite.com’s services are not geographically confined. Although based in Mumbai currently, they serve clients from across the country in cities like Bangalore, Delhi, Chennai, Pune, Ahmedabad, Kolkata, and Goa. “About 40% of our clients are from Mumbai and the rest are distributed across these other cities,” says Waqar.  

Unlike recruitment consultancies, they don’t charge a commission based on the salary offered to the selected candidate or the number of candidates hired. Instead, they charge a predetermined fixed fee depending on the type of recruitment services chosen. This way they “tailor” the solution as per the company’s needs. Thus it becomes an extremely cost effective alternative to using expensive job portals or paying heavy commissions to consultancies.

Their recruitment specialists filter job applications (CVs), tele-interview short listed candidates and then schedule them for interviews with the client – this leaves the client with making offers and hiring the candidate. “It’s as good as having a small remote recruitment team, starting at just Rs.8999 per month!” says Waqar.

Expansion Plans

“Our expansion plans are pretty straightforward. We are looking at scaling up in team size, increase marketing spends to reach out to relevant audience and empower our processes with more technology, for better results and standardization,” explains Jay.

They are also working on strategic tie-ups with different non-HR companies which have a similar target audience. They also plan to offer franchisees across India.

SutraLite has also recently launched a web-based SaaS product, sumHR (www.sumHR.com).  sumHR is engineered to let startups and small businesses simplify their HR management as their team grows bigger and difficult to manage.

To know more about them, visit www.sutralite.com.

Vinod Menon and Unmesh Nadkarni, having worked together for more than 9 years on various wealth management assignments and projects, often discussed the growing need for a personal wealth management system which will change the way individuals manage their wealth. The growing complexities of financial markets, the opening up of economies and growing cost pressures would only make wealth management a very challenging process. As individuals, they always visualized a wealth management platform, which is easily accessible, simple to understand, fast and cost effective. Over a period of time, the idea took shape, and they came together to form Finatics in mid 2011. Thereafter, the beta version of WealthOrganiser was launched in January 2012.

Finatics is a Mumbai based web technology company providing its wealth management software product, WealthOrganiser, as a service (SaaS).

WealthOrganiser allows wealth managers to provide professional advice to their clients and also help individuals to organize their wealth more professionally. WealthOrganiser is a cloud-based solution available both for wealth managers and customers on a subscription model. IFAs and customers can connect with each other on the same platform. “Currently, solutions offered in the market are primarily on a standalone model or focus on a specialized functionality. However, with WealthOrganiser, we plan to target the entire wealth management cycle and to make it available on the cloud,” says Vinod.

Vinod, Co-founder and Director, is a Chartered Accountant withover 17 years of experience in financial markets and software products. Unmesh, also Co-founder and Director, has over 12years of experience in software product development in the financial domain, primarily in wealth management. Both Vinod and Unmesh, along with most of their 8-member team earlier worked together at 3i Infotech.

Market

Asia, in recent years, has grown to be a strategically important region for wealth management businesses in terms of the rising number of investors as well as the availability of investment products where funds can be channeled. Research companies have described Asia as the most dyna

mically growing region for the wealth management industry in terms of both assets and funding opportunities.

The Boston Consulting Group’s Global Wealth 2011 report, predicts wealth will continue to grow at a 5.9% compound annual rate from 2010 to 2015. The report also mentions that the Asia Pacific region will grow the fastest at 11.4%.

Target Customers

The target audiences for WealthOrganiser are:

1. Wealth Managers
2. Individuals

Entities in the business of wealth management viz. IFAs (Individual Financial Advisors), wealth management firms etc. are the primary target for the application. Also, individuals who have some investments and are looking to actively track their money are the secondary targets for the application.

Distribution Channel

The company plans to reach to their target audience by the following methods:

1. Direct marketing (one to one)
2. Internet Marketing
3. Participation in workshops and seminars

Revenue Model

The revenue model for the company consists of:

1. Subscription fees from wealth managers
2. Subscription fees from customers
3. Product listings and advertisements

Competitive Overview

Currently, there are many players in this market right from large institutional players like Oracle and Infosys to smaller ones like Omni max, Investwell etc. “Some of the disadvantages of these market players,” says Vinod, “are:

• Obsolete technology
• Focus on large institutional players or small IFAs
• Focus on a specialized functional area like planning, reporting, CRM etc.
• Inability to manage constant changes in the market.”

The Finatics team plans to fill these gaps with WealthOrganiser.

“The entire team at Finatics is a strong believer of the famous quote, ‘You can’t discover new oceans unless you have the courage to leave the shore,’” concludes Vinod.

For more on WealthOrganiser, visit their website here.