Gowri Shankar Subramanian, CEO, Aspire Systems

Gowri is a co-founder of Aspire Systems and currently serves as its CEO.  In this position, he sets the strategic direction for Aspire and also oversees its day-to-day operations. Under his leadership, Aspire has grown at a CAGR of 63% over the past five years and has been ranked in Deloitte's list of fastest-growing companies in India and Asia-Pacific.

Gowri believes in the power of outsourcing to transform industries and fundamentally alter business dynamics.   Having watched up-close how sub-contract manufacturing transformed the electronics industry and how IBM, Cisco, HP, and others gradually outsourced all their manufacturing operations, Gowri firmly believes that software product building will go the same way and can be completely outsourced. This simple premise never fails to spark a substantial debate and it underlines everything that Aspire does.

Q: What is your secret recipe to go beyond the ordinary and attain long-term success? How is your customer benefited?
A: Several years of building quality software products for software product companies has culminated into “Producteering™” – Aspire’s approach for building well-engineered software products quickly and consistently.

Producteering is a set of principles and practices, driven by the right people and supported by the right platform. The four tenets of Producteering – Principles, People, Process and Platform - enables products to be built better and faster. This helps our customers to hit the market rapidly, economically and consistently.

Q: On what basis are the Producteering principles set?
A: Software products that deliver real and unique benefits to users are the ones that succeed and garner a high market share. However, market orientation is critical to a product’s success and this involves having a thorough understanding of end-users’ needs and wants, the competitive situation and the nature of the market.

In spite of knowing this, most companies still delay asking users what they think of their products until the product is almost launched. This brings us to the principles of Producteering, which will enable organizations to bring their customers early into the feedback loop, and allow for development of products quickly with consistent and predictable quality:

Aspire’s Producteering Principles are a) deliver working software frequently b) recognize the variables: Time, Budget and Scope c) Select processes specific to the stage of product d) Focus on both the engineering process as well as the project management process.

Q: What is the difference between product development and application development?
A: To understand the differences between Product Development and Applications Development, it would probably help to first understand the difference between a product and an application.

An application is "custom-built" for a single company, but a product is "generic" and is built to cater to the demands of a wide variety of users. However, each user needs to be able to use the product in a way that suits them. Hence, a product must be customizable, scalable, robust, well-architected, and must have a solid framework on which we can build newer features. As opposed to this, an application just needs to work.

Building a "well-engineered" product requires a much higher level of skills than just building an application that needs to work. Typically, customers for application development look at and test the screens of the application to know whether it works.  Whereas, product customers look into the code base to see how it meets the attributes of scalability, robustness, customizability and architecture adherence.  Hence, the engineers working on product development need to have a much higher order of skills. At Aspire Systems, we call our engineers as PRODUCTEERS to differentiate them from IT generalists.

Q: What is driving the product development outsourcing segment in India?
A: Product companies are under pressure to release new versions and new products frequently to the market to keep up with customer demands and beat competitors.  This creates a significant need for product companies to outsource their product development activities.

If a product company could crash their product roadmap and release versions earlier than planned, they could gain significantly in terms of market share and revenues.  But, budgets for product development are fixed and resources are finite.  So, the only way a product company can crash their roadmap is to outsource some of their product development activities to an OPD company.  This is what drives the product development outsourcing segment. Another source of impetus for India's product development market comes from US-based Venture Capital firms. These firms are encouraging their portfolio companies to use, or at least investigate product development options in India.

Q: How do you view the impact of weak dollar on the outsourcing industry?
A: We think outsourcing as a business model is still vibrant and it works. There can’t be sudden reversals. Gartner predicts global outsourcing spend to increase from 408 in 2007 to 441 billion in 2008. An increasing number of outsourcing companies view scale of operations, operational efficiency and process improvements as key growth parameters. Outsourcing companies are also increasing their contract prices to counter the effects of wage and currency factors. 

The demand for IT is so huge, and on the talent supply side, there is no country that can match India easily! Majority of the Indian outsourcing companies recognise this and invest in their people by improving their training effectiveness and bringing industry and academia closer to ensure higher preparedness in the new job entrant. One example is Aspire's Impact Training - which takes engineers from colleges and gives them real-time projects with dedicated mentors from the organization helping them to do the real thing. This will help in boosting productivity of these fresh engineers from the day they join.

Q: Why would a large product company opt for a third party OPD vendor instead of setting up a captive of his own?
A: We are of the view that this is not an either-or question. Large product companies will in-fact establishes a captive, as most of them have done. But, significant amounts of work will start to be outsourced by large product companies and possibly managed locally by the captives. The captives would still probably retain work on some very core areas in the near to mid-term, but the cost-economics of captives is such that it would not make sense for them to scale their teams to do everything required by the parent company. Instead, they are likely to establish strong relationships with OPD companies to handle some areas of product development. We already see this trend happening.

Updated on: 11 Mar, 2008