In my recent interview with K. Venkatesh of YourStory.in, I spoke about how I got started,  my journey, marketing SaaS in India, my new book and the challenges I faced in terms of customer acquisition, hiring etc. to get DeskAway off the ground.

Like most youth from India, I left for the US in 1998 in search for a business degree. Along the way, I bumped into a few dozen courses in computer science, and realized that it was my calling. With business acumen, and sound technical background, it wasn’t long before I joined the founding team of an entrepreneurship society in my university, hobnobbing with like-minded individuals, investors and spending a good deal of time around incubators.

Through college and post-graduation, I held multiple jobs in various verticals and industries (see details below) determined to get a feel of many business types, as I knew I would soon start my own Internet business. During the post-9/11 economic crunch, I survived on freelance jobs until I could land on my feet. In 2002, I co-started a web design and development consultancy with my wife, which I ran while holding down a full-time job in an e-healthcare firm. Our consultancy, after a bumpy start, began taking off and we had large publicly traded companies on our retainer in 3 years.

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The world’s largest-selling English newspaper, The Times of India, today ran a story in their business section (pg 23) on Startups usher in 3rd IT wave in India. The first waves were in BPO and the IT services (think ‘outsourcing’). Today, we are witnessing the birth of product companies from India harnessing Software As A Service (SaaS) and Cloud Computing - the 3rd wave.

We are very excited to read that DeskAway is one of these startups. In fact, this is exactly in line with my vision - of building a successful global product company from India. This is what we have held onto since 2006 - when we reluctantly phased out our service business and jumped into product development. I am happy to see other companies take the tough route to build something that will ‘build to last’.

What a better way to start a Monday morning!

Mobicules is an agile web and mobile app development company, working with new technology ventures and some of the biggest brands around, helping them build sophisticated world class products while meeting aggressive go-to-market times required for web and mobile products today. We are a 40 people team and work with some very demanding clients spread all over the world. We have been at the forefront of the technologies we work on, and are very quick to adopt and adapt to technical and methodology changes.

Mobicules was founded by Munish Bansal and Niraj Ranjan Rout, who have a combined experience of more than 15 years in diverse technical areas such as the internet, VLSI design, EDA and mobile technologies.

“Everything in DeskAway works really well for us.”

Munish Bansal and Niraj Ranjan Rout, Mobicules Founder

This is how they use DeskAway,

How are you using DeskAway when growing your business?
In the last six months, we have moved the project management for all the projects running at Mobicules to DeskAway. DeskAway has helped us in communicating with our clients better, in keeping information documented, and in helping large teams collaborate better to achieve project targets.

Were you using any other tool before DeskAway?
We were using a combination of Redmine, Google Sites and BaseCamp before we switched to DeskAway.

Was there a learning curve associated with DeskAway? How did your team adapt to a new application?
It hardly took any time. Not just our team, our clients too switched from whatever we were using to DeskAway in time. The learning videos interspersed throughout the site greatly accelerated the learning process on DeskAway. Messages, Tasks, Files and Issues work in a very intuitive manner. The interface is really zippy, and we feel very comfortable working on DeskAway.

What features does your team use/like the most?
We use Messages, Tasks and Files very heavily. Being able to add comments to just about everything really helps.

Are there any other thoughts that you would want to share with us regarding our service, product etc.?
As for now, everything in DeskAway works really well for us. As a services company, we’d love to see features like time-logging by developers and automated timesheet creation for projects or developers. We find the pricing to be very good. We haven’t had a reason to contact the support team till now, but we have no reason to believe that the support would not be stellar.

Thanks!

If you are using DeskAway and would like to get featured, please drop us a note and we will get in touch with you.

Some interesting points from ‘Cloud Adoption: The Difference Between Small & Large Companies‘ on Sandhill.com…

Another interesting pattern emerges when you look at the really small companies with less than 100 employees. A recent survey by Spiceworks Inc. resulted in 1,500 global responses from their Voice of IT Market Research Program. In this survey, nearly half of the responses (47 percent) are from businesses with fewer than 20 employees, while 24 percent are from businesses with 100 or more employees. The data shows that 14 percent of SMBs are currently using cloud solutions and another 10 percent plan to deploy cloud services over the next six months. The smallest SMBs (companies with less than 20 employees), high-tech companies, and companies in emerging economies are on the leading edge of the adoption curve. Though the user base is smaller today, the adoption rate appears to be growing.

Our research found that SMEs are twice as likely to move their core business-critical services to the cloud as large enterprises (25 percent versus 12 percent)

Cloud adoption is catching up with the hype. For example, some SMBs have up to 80 percent of their services in the cloud.

No doubt that almost everybody will be using cloud services in the near future. Though, the adoption by small businesses is going to lead the way.

As SaaS vendors, we are looking for ways to drive traffic to our site so that more people can try out our app. Besides your expensive SEM strategies, I have been curious to try out business app stores that help vendors like us to connect with potential buyers. One of them I came across recently is GetApp - a one stop shop for buyers to compare web applications.

I recently added and updated the DeskAway listing there. If you are a fan of DeskAway do check us out on GetApp and leave us a comment:

http://www.getapp.com/deskaway-application

Thanks!

PS - Good job by the GetApp Founders - Christophe Primault and Manuel Jaffrin

This post has been adapted from Sahil Parikh’s lifestream blog