With the booming Indian real estate market and increasing purchase power of the common man, buyers have little information to help them judge and choose their dream home and builders have bigger worries on how to manage the inventory effectively. Bangalore based startup Sadanika Solutions is trying to address this problem. Imagine buying an apartment or house, with not only a click of a button, but also then getting updates at every stage of the buying and construction process.YourStory.in caught up with Kshitij Minglani and Rajat Kothari from Sadanika Solutions (TECH30 Company) to know more about their venture.

Briefly tell us about Sadanika Solutions and your products and offerings

We are a Bangalore based start-up, dedicated towards building smarter technology solutions for the real estate sector. Sadanika means Home in Sanskrit. Our first flagship product is India’s first online application www.homebuy360.com that provides a login/user interface to the buyers. And this month we are launching another revolutionary concept around property search www.homefind360.com

Homebuy360 is a simple and intuitive to use internet application specifically designed for the real estate industry to make Builders and Buyers win. Builders can efficiently manage marketing, sales and customer connect operations – CRM – Leads – Booking – Documents – Collections – Customizations – Handover. Buyers can login to their Home Account and monitor progress and information relating to their dream home.

Homefind360 has Google like Simplicity, provides Information that Matters to property finders with proprietary Technical Superiority of search and property ranking algorithm. It is slated to change how people search property in India.

How did the idea for H360 come about?

During our journey at Infosys, we interacted with a lot of our-colleagues (prospective buyers) and also with various real estate builders/developers in and around Bangalore. The biggest gap that stared at us was the lack of smart technology that would help buyers find the “right” home as well as connect them with a segment of builders suitable for their specific needs.

We began exploring the “buy” process, while discussing the same with property buyers. What came out during those conversations was the idea of having a “home account” that was similar to a personal bank account, this sounded really exciting to them and they envisaged it would be very helpful. Most of them didn’t mind paying a small fee to get this.

At the other end of the spectrum, we also met new upcoming builders and excited them with a thought of having a simplistic application to efficiently manage their operations over the web. The application would have features such as Customer relation management (CRM), booking, documentation, collection, issue management and reporting. The promising part of the application would be, that it was going to be hosted on the Cloud and therefore would operate on the “pay-per-use” or “pay-over-time” model and with no upfront investment in hardware, installation etc.

Based on all this research, we validated our idea and got to the task of creating a simplistic, effective and efficient tool. We worked for several months tirelessly to bring homebuy360 to markets in Feb 2011. During the development phase we interacted with over 300 builders in Bangalore, Mumbai and Pune. While there was a willingness to adopt technology for operational efficiency and for better customer care; their biggest demand was a neat clear approach in selling. The commercials for such a proposal were never a hindrance.  This is where the idea of homefind360 came into being.

Aren’t there already many players in this space, how are your offerings different from them?

There are 2-3 Existing ERP players in the market who have similar offering as our Homebuy360. But, they require huge upfront investment in servers, training & cost of running, are based on license/user based model, highly complex to use and takes time to implement.

Whereas what we have is cloud based technology with simplistic UI, requires no training and low cost of ownership over time. We have created a new/niche value for buyers through providing a login (something that didn’t exist). Our market-brand campaign addresses the buyer community as well. The pressure will soon kick in from the buyer’s side for builders to adopt homebuy360. We are challenging the existing competitor pricing model which is based on license fee.

With Homefind360 – there are few existing banner sites like – 99acres, Magicbricks, etc. and few listing sites like – CraigsList, HDFC Red, Sulekha, etc and potentially other banks might come up with a similar site as of HDFC Red. Most of them have a cluttered landing page which is confusing. They might have a good volume/traffic, but the search relevance and effectiveness are questionable.

We have created a Google like interface which provides relevant search results in a flash. We have emphasized on simplistic display so that the users can make have a better and engaging interaction with the system. At the backend, we focus heavily on information that matters with logic behind every search display. We have built intelligent profiling that suggest builders how to increase their visibility. Our current offering is based on outcome based pricing options (pay-per-click, pay-per-impression, pay-per-lead, pay-per-sale) can disrupt the existing banner advertisement based pricing model.

Tell us about your background 

Kshitij Minglani (Co-Founder and Director)

Kshitij has held leadership positions in areas such as Corporate Planning, Business Growth Strategy, Mergers and Acquisitions. Has successfully lead teams’, comprising of different nationalities. Kshitij has worked very closely with the senior management at Infosys. His love for travel and food has taken him places and his passion towards making business ideas work to perfection gives him an adrenaline rush.

Rajat Kothari (Co-Founder and Director)

An avid reader and an ardent gaming enthusiast with more than 11 years of Infosys experience in Project Management, Technology Architecture, Cloud Application Development and Maintenance & Support Services. Rajat has worked with several fortune 100 clients that are leaders in the area of e-commerce and pioneers in web technology innovation. Rajat brings the technology-core competency to the team.

We founded the company in Feb 2010, but the founders came full time into it in Oct 2010. We are a self-funded company and our major capital investment till now has been on technology.

How many customers do you have currently?

Homebuy360 was launched in Feb 2011, since then we have roped in 12 paying clients (builders) and have expanded our operations to Bangalore, Mumbai/Navi Mumbai and Pune. We are very well received in the market and our unique concepts help builders increase sales, reduce admin costs and delight customers. Typically the ROI for them is 3-4 times with/over the lifecycle of a residential project. With both Homebuy360 and Homefind306 we would impact about 80K-100K home buyers in the coming year.

What are the advantages you have over your competitors?

1. We have created a new/niche value for Buyers through providing a login (something that didn’t exist). Homefind360 is set to re-define the way people search property today.
2. Our market-brand campaign addresses the buyer community as well. The pressure will soon kick in from the buyer’s side for builders to adopt homebuy360.
3. We are challenging the existing competitor pricing model which is based on license fee.
4. We also have capital commitment and mentorship from few Infosys Senior Managers.

We have also kept in mind that for us to obtain a decent market share, we would need to disrupt the revenue model of existing players which is primarily “banner” ads based. We would soon be launching homefind360, where the pricing would be similar to Google sponsored ads, pay-per-click, pay-per-impression, pay-per-lead and pay-per-conversion. The site would also have new ideas like “Group Home Buying”, “Rental Assist” etc for a very large moving population in India. With two complimenting products (homebuy360 and homefind360), we can use the same channel to sell our both the products. It also creates high entry barrier for new competitors who would look to join homebuy360 bandwagon.

Thus our business model is extremely tied up and very well knit and we strongly believe our cost structure, pricing model and marketing strategy are all market killers for us.

How are you generating revenues currently?

With Homebuy360 we generate revenue from Builders and Providers. We offer Pay per Use model with low cost of ownership over time. Pricing models vary from pay as you sell, pay over time, per project to one time annual charge etc. We encourage builders can charge back the fees they pay us to their buyers given the value created and provided to buyers through the online login. This essentially means, builders can use the application for free by transferring our fees to the buyers. We also generate revenues based on advertisements – usually when any project is nearing completion, there are several providers of electronics, furniture, furnishing, electrical appliances that need to reach to the home buyers.

With Homefind360 our source of revenue is from Builders, Brokers, Providers and Banks. Here we offer Pay-per-click, pay-per-impression, pay-per-lead, pay-per-sale and few banner ads.

Where do you see the home buying market in India and H360 in five years from now?

Next 5 years are going to be transformational years for real estate industry as it continues to grow leap and bounds. With large number of buyers coming from IT and High tech industry along with increased adoption of internet usage technology is bound to take center stage. Technology is also essential for industry to sustain its growth, increase its productivity and to serve the customers better. This is a perfect opportunity for new breed of entrepreneurs to develop path-breaking technology innovation for real estate industry.

Tell us about the team behind H360

Apart from the two Co-founders with a combined experience of 20 yrs, we have a core Technology team comprising of two head strong individuals who bring a combined experience of 17 yrs and a team of young Business Development guys who have previous worked at HDFC, 99acres, etc.

We currently have operations in Bangalore and Mumbai/Navi Mumbai and soon plan to expand to Pune and Chennai this quarter. By the end of 2011 we plan to have our operations setup in Bangalore, Chennai, Pune, Mumbai and Hyderabad.

We are currently looking to build a strong Business Development team in Pune, Mumbai and Chennai, and recruit head strong IT and SEO profiles in Bangalore.

YourStory.in wishes Kshitij, Rajat and the entire Sadanika team all the best with their startup journey. To know more about their products and services, please visit www.homebuy360.com or mail them at contact@homebuy360.com
Chandan Raj | Bengaluru

Gluster enables businesses to build Google or Facebook like scalable storage on top of commodity servers. Introduced in 2006, GlusterFS is the leading free / open source cloud file system today, powering 1000s of deployments and multiple petabytes of storage. YourStory got in touch with the Hitesh Chellani and Anand Babu Periasamy – the entrepreneurs behind Gluster to get to know about their journey till now.

What’s with the name Gluster? How did the idea come about?

The name Gluster comes from GNU plus Cluster.

We first founded Z RESEARCH in 2005 with the goal of simplifying clustered computing. Our first prospect was Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. (PDVSA), a Venezuelan state-owned oil company. PDVSA needed a prototype compute and storage solution to increase its petroleum production.  The compute side was easily addressed, however seismic data required petascale high-performance storage with a high degree of reliability. We looked at various options, but eventually ended up writing a file system from scratch, taking a fundamentally different approach to implementing a scalable storage operating system.

We began with 200K in angel investments and in 2006 closed our first order with PDVSA which was 500K.

Tell us about your background.

Hitesh Chellani has been leading the overall strategy and business execution for Gluster since co-founding the company with AB in 2005. Prior to Gluster, he was at California Digital Corporation where his role was business development and systems engineering. During his tenure at CDC, Hitesh managed the system integration facility that deployed the ‘Thunder’ supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory which at the time was the second fastest supercomputer in the world. Prior to Gluster, he co-founded two trading companies in Dubai UAE where he managed business development and sales. Hitesh began his career as a software engineer for Tata Unisys in India. He holds a Bachelors Degree in Engineering from Bombay University.

Anand Babu Periasamy as CTO and Co-founder sets the vision and strategy for the Gluster product platform. Prior to Gluster, AB served as CTO at California Digital Corporation, where his work led to the scaling of the commodity cluster computing to supercomputing class performance. He drove the adoption of cluster computing and GNU/Linux at enterprise data centers and helped close strategic accounts at CDC. In 2004, AB led the development of the world’s second fastest Supercomputer “Thunder”, for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. AB also serves on the board of “Free Software Foundation – India”. He is the author / contributor to various other Free Software projects like GNU FreeIPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface), GNU Garp (Gratuitous ARP Daemon), bios-config (edit/replicate CMOS parameters), librpci (RPC interpose for GNU Hurd), GNU Freetalk (Scheme extensible messenger for Jabber, Google talk), and Freehoo (Scheme extensible messenger for YahooIM). He holds a Computer Science Engineering degree from Annamalai University, Tamil Nadu, India.

How is Gluster solving the cloud storage problem?

Here is an example case study for our customer Brightcove, one of North America’s leading online video platform and content delivery network.

Problem

Brightcove needed a scalable high performance storage for their video content. Traditional storage solutions from large vendors were simply too expensive and did not meet scalability requirements.

Solution

Brighcove sys-admins found GlusterFS through our community and learnt by themselves to create a petascale video storage system on top of low-cost commodity servers and Ethernet networking. Once they were in production, they approached us to purchase commercial subscription. Benefits include easy scaling capacity with centralized management, one administrator to manage day-to-day operations and huge savings for customer.

How big is your Customer base?

Gluster currently has over 150 customers and likely thousands of community deployment of its flagship file system, GlusterFS. Most of the success is in digital media storage, for example photos, audio, video, music and just documents. We are seeing new traction in cloud, virtualization and big data use cases.

Gluster Community Deployments Highlights

How is Gluster’s offering unique compared to other players in the same space?

We enable cloud storage providers. Gluster is a software only storage product. Users procure hardware from their own hardware vendor of choice. We see deployments both in the public clouds and private clouds. Everyone wants Google-like storage to handle the explosive growth of data.

What makes Gluster different from a business angle is its software only instead of hardware appliance, scale-out instead of monolithic, commodity hardware instead of purpose built, open source business model instead of proprietary model.

One of the major differentiators is in terms of the technology. Developing file systems was considered notoriously complicated and time consuming. Scalable file systems were one of the hardest computer science engineering problems. We knew back from the supercomputing days that simplicity was the key to scalability. If the foundation is simple, we can do complicated logic on top of it. We inverted the storage operating system design by making file system as the operating system container. We came up with elastic hashing algorithm to eliminate the need for meta-data servers. We then took a micro-kernel based OS design to push the storage operating system functionalities to user space. User data is kept in simple familiar format to easily restore from failures. Additionally, the file system heals itself automatically without down time. There are many clever innovations in GlusterFS, yet we consider the key differentiation is “common sense”.

How do you foresee Cloud Storage shaping up in future?

IDC recently reported the storage software business will grow by 7.8% in 2011 and public cloud computing services will be a $72.9 billion market in 2015, up from $21.5 billion in 2010. Just these numbers alone are very telling of what the cloud storage market will be like in the next five years.

Cloud is rapidly commoditizing scalable computing and storage environment. Google like infrastructure is available to all, with no initial investment or expertise. Cloud is about to unveil a revolution in the application space.

We are starting to see queries from large hosted service providers and Telcos who want to build out an AWS-like equivalent or a cloud to offer platform as a service (PaaS) to their customer.

What’s your take on the Indian Cloud Story and what is Gluster’s strategy?

The India cloud market is not very far behind the US and given the price sensitive nature of customers in the Indian subcontinent, cloud could take off in a big way.

We will continue to expand our R&D team in India. India is leaping into the cloud computing segment, making a paradigm shift on the technology fronts. The Indian cloud market will exceed $4 billion in the next 4 years so there is lot of potential for us to grow.

So, GlusterFS is free/open source, how is the company generating revenue?

Gluster’s business model is similar to Red Hat and MySQL. We offer commercial subscriptions for our open source cloud storage platform. These subscriptions provide support, updates, upgrades, and access to the Gluster Support Network. We also offer professional services and training. Our products are available via direct purchase from Gluster, our network of over 30 resellers and partners, and via cloud partners such as Amazon and Rightscale. Gluster is sold on as a subscription (either monthly or annual) which is charged (as appropriate) per server node, virtual machine, or cloud compute instance.

Did you raise any further round of funding after the initial angel investment?

We announced an $8.5 million Series B in November 2010 and have raised $12.5 million to date. Both rounds including funding from Index Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners who both see a clear demand for a disruptive and innovative approach to storage that matches the trend towards lower cost solutions and greater manageability.

How has the journey been so far?

Building a storage company is a very hard challenge to take on. Many startups and even large vendors are working on solving the storage scalability problem. Only a few survived the storage startup curse. Gluster and Isilon (now EMC) are amongst the lucky ones.

We strongly believe in people. Everything about Gluster is about our team. Technology is secondary. We have kept the working environment fun. The open source business model helped us in a big way, from finding passionate people to high profile customers. Our open source community helped us build a large QA platform, viral marketing engine, training program and knowledge base. Additionally, what helped us keep down cost was we took a software only approach; and, most importantly, we kept our burn rate low.

Tell us about the team behind Gluster?

Gluster currently has 66 employees and a veteran executive management team which includes ex-Plaxo CEO, Ben Golub. For five years prior to joining Gluster, Ben served as the President and CEO of Plaxo, a social networking infrastructure pioneer backed by industry luminaries Michael Moritz (Sequoia), Ram Shriram, Globespan Capital and Cisco. Ben led Plaxo through a complete turnaround, bringing the company to profitability, over 20 million users, and a large and successful acquisition by Comcast Interactive Media.

Along with Ben we have John Kreisa, VP Marketing with 18+ years of marketing experience at Cloudera, Mark Logic, Verix, Business Objects and Autometric, Dave Garnett, VP of Product Management with 15+ years of product management experience at companies including HP and Axcient, Lori Budin, VP Channels with 12+ years in Sales Strategy and Channel Development at Verisign, Channel Fundamentals and Mike Backlund, SVP Sales with 12+ years in Sales at BayNote, Quorum, Interwoven

And, we are looking for talented individuals to join the Gluster team. We are actively hiring and are looking forward to add team members in India, Europe and Sunnyvale, California headquarters.

YourStory wishes Gluster team the very best in their cloud storage journey. For more detail about Gluster please visit their website - www.gluster.com and to connect with the GlusterFS open community visit www.gluster.org

Chandan Raj | Bengaluru