K7 COMPUTING
S. SRINIVISA KUMAR, BUSINESS HEAD, VECTRA SYSTEMS & SOLUTIONS PVT. LTD.
JAYARAMAN KESAVARDHANAN, FOUNDER AND CEO, K7 COMPUTING PVT. LTD.
“MY VISION IS TO MAKE K7 NO.1 IN THE INDIA MARKET” of innovative things those days but never realized the need of commercial or business aspects of the product or even patenting it or taking to a much bigger market, etc.” K7 was the first company to bring out product for Novel NetWare in India. The company predominantly dominated the Novel NetWare market those days. But the biggest break came to him in around 2002 when he got an interesting offer from one of the biggest software publishers from Japan called SOURCENEXT Corporation, which was selling McAfee earlier, to distribute K7 products. Keseven adds, “They were excited to see how K7 product is coming out of a small team in India compared to big MNCs like McAfee. They were wondering how we were able to develop a product with handful of talented people. They studied the product and decided to take the product for distribution. It was a real turning point.” This turn around was a dream come true for the company! Globally, Japan is the second largest market in terms of PC penetration and a partner from this country was ready to distribute their products. So there was no other news bigger than this for K7 at that point of time. In order to leverage the market, K7 completely dedicated
Vectra systems started with selling Toshiba from HCL during 1995 but later transformed into an end-to-end solution provider. A Rs.18 crore company, Vectra has chosen products which can help them maintain their bottom-line. Today, they are selling TCS iON Cloud Computing and K7 Enterprise Security. After creating a niche in the consumer segment, K7 has started growning in depth into the Enterprise and SMB market spaces in a short span.
its resources to make the product powerful and highly qualitative. The company almost stopped selling the products in India. Finally, the product was launched in Japan in 2003 and was an instant success. In the first year, K7 earned US$2million revenue, and in the second year US$5mllion revenue, and in third year, the company achieved a reasonable size of the market with 20 per cent market share, which later on increased to 25 per cent. This expansion gave K7 a tremendous boost. For the next four to fiive years, there was no stopping Keseven and no respite either. With a good cash reserve and good market position, etc., in 2007 Keseven realised the need of refocusing on India as the market was becoming very large in terms of volume. . After being successful in Japan, he thought India market would be a cake walk, but it was not meant to be. When he launched his products, he had to face a stiff resistance from both technology and sales perspective. He realised that people in India use PCs for a long time and top up the old machine with updated software and OS as a result the hardware and software does not gel with each other. So he quickly responded to the issues and made the product
SME BIZ
JOJI PHILIP, DGM, ORIENT TECHNOLOGIES PVT. LTD. Orient technology is a group of company with Rs.145 crores of turnover with pan India presence. Based on their experience they claim that K7 is a real world class product. Compared to other products, it finds K7 easy-tomanage, scalable, flexible and enterprise class. It has also won cases against old established MNC companies for K7. And says is very good when it comes to extending their support to the partners to better serve customers. It says that K7 is soon going to be one of the market leaders.
more robust. But the issue of sales still persisted as there was no ecosystem of channel for software distribution. Keseven also thought that like in Japan there would be a channel for software selling so he would not require more people for sales and would focus only on product development, but he was wrong. Keseven said, “The distributors of the country were not able to understand the products. So I had to jump into the management role to drive the business as CEO. Post which I established the entire channel network and it took me two to three years to establish operation in India.” Today, Compuage Infocom Ltd. is the national distributor. K7 has decent market share in India and in Japan they keep toggling between No. 2 or 3.
Finally… Keseven’s vision is to make K7 a US$100 million company by the end of this year; and to make No.1 in India market and have good market share globally as well. K7’s asset is developers who have been there with the company for the last 10-15 years, who knows how to create the product from grounds up.
SME CHANNELS 49 FEBRUARY 2013
SME Biz_k7.indd 49
20/02/13 9:48 AM