Aufait's CEO Mr.Bijith's Interview in Read It India

June 1st 2009 - Calicut, India

Recently our CEO Mr.Bijith had an interview with Read It India. Bijith talks about his passion for entrepreneurship and how it turned out to be a successful venture called "Aufait Technologies". Bijith also spoke about Aufait's core focus and the market offerings. Various other topics like Aufait's recent spun off "Greenlemon", Aufait's strength, Growth plan, strategies to ride against the recession wave, IT industry's future were also discussed.

As a feather to the cap, this interview was featured in the home page of Intalio's website. Intalio is an Open Source Business Process platform company which is listed in Gartner's Visionary companies.


Read the full interview below:
Aufait, a unique name, neither a dictionary word not a proper noun has its roots in the Arabic word "Ufeth". That means "fulfilling commitments". And that is what Aufait Technologies stands for.

Aufait Technologies is a software services provider that offer to Business Process Management Solutions to various Industry Verticals. While during recession companies fired employees, Aufait took the opportunity to hire the quality professionals. It hired two IIM-K graduates into its management team, which shows the high aspirations of this 40 employees company. It is not only in strategic hiring mode in recession, its also developing strategic partnerships with key companies in its domain. Aufait has recently partnered with Intalio, an open-source Business Process Platform company and one of the Gartner's visionary companies.

Readit India's Senior Editor Kumar GS had a chance to interview Aufait Technologies CEO Mr. Bijith Ahmed, and explored the many facets of this IT company.

Kumar GS: What made you co-found Aufait Technologies? How old is Aufait as a company?
Bijith Ahmed: The idea of setting up own business was there in mind since college time and we had tried couple of attempts before Aufait goes on track. Initially it was planned as a web multimedia company based in Bangalore. We started as as informal setup in Bangalore and later we moved to Calicut, Kerala and established Aufait as a private limited company in 2003.

Kumar GS: What services do you offer and what specific "Customer Pains" do they cater to?
Bijith Ahmed: Once we came out of the initial startup glitches, we decided to fine tune our target segment and the applications area on which Aufait should have its focus. Then we decided to offer solutions like BPM, Portals and GIS. Let us talk about the "Customer Pains" that BPM solutions will alleviate. In the current turbulent economic scenario, companies are struggling to reduce their IT cost and make most out of their current IT infrastructure. Hence they need an agile IT system which will allow them to have a firm control over their business processes which need to evolve constantly. BPM will allow the customers to have process governance, agile IT systems, real-time monitoring and modification of their business processes. Most of all, it will help in better alignment of IT with business.

Aufait, being a silver partner of Intalio- the open source leader in BPM, will provide cost-effective and innovative BPM solutions to the customers.

Kumar GS: Are you catering to all verticals or focusing on some specific Industry verticals? What specific Industry verticals?
Bijith Ahmed: Though we have industry specific solutions for Government, Airlines and hospitality, currently we are leveraging our expertise on the above industries to provide horizontal solutions such as Portals and BPM which can be used in any industry verticals.

Kumar GS: Tell us something about your management team and its strengths?
Bijith Ahmed: Aufait was founded by a band of professionals from some of the leading IT companies like HP, SAP and Honeywell. Our current management team consists of Engineers with more than 15 years of Experience in IT industry and also people from IIMs and IITs. Today a cream of World-class technical and management professionals constitutes Aufait's Management Team.

Kumar GS: I did not find any information about your team on your website, unlike other websites? Do you have any specific reasons for hiding this information?
Bijith Ahmed: There is no specific reason. Soon we will be adding the details to our site.

Kumar GS: Are you a Privately Funded Firm or VC Funded? If privately held, are you looking for any VC fundings in future?
Bijith Ahmed: Currently Aufait is a privately funded organization and talks are going on with VC and look very convincing.

Kumar GS: Out of Microsoft .NET, Java/J2EE and PHP/ MySQL (LAMP), which one do you think is your core strength?
Bijith Ahmed: J2EE is our biggest practice. We have teams in other mentioned technologies also.

Kumar GS: Have you developed any Product also? If yes, what?
Bijith Ahmed: Yes. We have two products in our portfolio. e-Recruit: e-Recruit is a simple online recruitment system that makes your hiring process easier, faster and cost effective. e-Recruit enables recruitment team to create job postings, manage job application responses, update job status and take quick reports for screening which drastically reduces the labor and money spent on manual recruitment.
Promise: Promise is our Property Management System which provides a new and innovative way to perform property management tasks more efficiently. This is a web-based property management solution developed for property managers of residential and commercial properties.

Kumar GS: Do you think India still has strength in IT Services?
Bijith Ahmed: Of course YES. But to remain competitive in the face of threats from Eastern Europe and China, the expenses and the compensation need to be leveled.

Kumar GS: What is Greenlemon? Why Greenlemon was launched as a new company? What services do it offer? How is it different from Aufait?
Bijith Ahmed: Greenlemon is offering internet marketing services, which is totally a non technical company. With this spun off, Aufait's focus on enterprise solutions can be strengthened. Greenlemon, as a company with specific focus on Internet Marketing solutions will give lot of mileage than projecting it as a brand under Aufait, which is having Enterprise solutions as its core focus.

Kumar GS: I find your both companies have blogs? How do you think Blogs help companies in their growth or are they mere a fad?
Bijith Ahmed: It really helps us to generate good number of leads online and help us to increase our visibility on various search engines. Also Aufait is yet to publish its core technical and business oriented blogs by which we aim to expose our expertise to prospective customers. We are expecting these blogs to showcase our technical expertise and the credibility among the viewers.

Kumar GS: During Recession, how are you marketing your products?
Bijith Ahmed: Since we have been focusing more on Middle East market, we have very few negative signals from Dubai. Based on this experience we are planning to strengthen our focus on other non-affected regions. Also BFS is not our core vertical and this adds to our advantages since that is the most seriously affected industry of the ongoing recession.

Kumar GS: What is the employee strength of your company?
Bijith Ahmed: Around 40

Kumar GS: What keeps Aufait-ians motivated, everyday?
Bijith Ahmed: Aufait is an open and flat organization. The autonomy given to the employees and the work-Life balance keeps them motivated even in pressing times.

Kumar GS: To which customer segment do E-Recruit helps: HR Managers of the companies or professional recruitment agencies?
Bijith Ahmed: e-Recruit helps HR Managers in automating the entire recruitment cycle starting from Recruitment requests from various departments, publishing them online, shortlisting, filtering, communicating, scheduling interviews etc.

Kumar GS: Because every new entrant in the existing market needs to have some unique to offer, how is e-Recruit better than existing recruitment portal like Naukari.com, Monster.com?
Bijith Ahmed: e-Recruit is not a portal but a recruitment solution for SMBs. Though there are players here too, with our unique pricing with minimum and most useful features will be differentiating factor. We are also planning to take e-Recruit to SaaS and Pensource model.

Kumar GS: Can E-Recruit integrate with other HCM solutions?
Bijith Ahmed: No. But we have planned to incorporate some additional features in subsequent releases. It will include connectors for major vendors in HCM.

Kumar GS: What are internet marketing services that you offer?
Bijith Ahmed: Basically our offshoot "Greenlemon" takes care of all internet marketing services. We provide solutions ranging from web strategy consultancy, social media optimization, Search Engine Optimization, PPC and email campaigns and web development.

Kumar GS: How do your portal solutions help companies to grow their business further? With billions of portals available, how your portal solutions are different?
Bijith Ahmed: We have expertise on multiple enterprise portal technologies like SharePoint, Lifreray apart from public portals based on drupal, joomla etc. We have developed portals for real-estate, e commerce, media, travel, etc. We believe that portals are integral part of Business Process Platform of any organization which makes them adapt to changes quickly and helps them retain their competitiveness in the ever changing market place. Since we mostly depend on proven enterprise ready platforms, our value addition comes in the form of creating better user experience and thus engaging users for better productivity .

Kumar GS: What you do to manage your costs during recession?
Bijith Ahmed: Basically we used to be a "Cost Conscious Organization"; even before recession we handle costs with care. And secondly the market and the geographies we serve are one of the least affected segments. So we are yet to face the serious part of it. But we have taken a wait and watch approach and hence some of our appraisals are on hold.

Kumar GS: What are the core strengths of Aufait and what areas are you looking to significantly improve upon?
Bijith Ahmed: Openness, transparency and flexibility are believed to be the core strength. We would like to improve our strength in our offerings like BPM, Portal and GIS and become leaders in these core focus areas.

Kumar GS: What you see in the future for Aufait in terms of Financial Growth and in terms of employee strength?
Bijith Ahmed: We have devised a practical growth plan based on our offerings and the target markets. Currently we have planned in such a way to triple our strength by end of this year basically by strengthening our sales and marketing activities.

Kumar GS: What is your prediction for Future of IT companies in India for next Five Years?
Bijith Ahmed: The IT Industry is getting "leveled" because of the current economic scenario. There is a bit of overselling happening around. . Influence of social media and new models like SaaS, cloud computing, etc. will force big players to think of different alternatives and help new entrants like us to come up. Once the industry is leveled, it will just move on like any other industry.


Link: http://readit.in/business-news/2009/05/aufait-technologies-delivers-business-process-management-solutions-with-full-commitments/

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