An exclusive interview with IT.Voice,Mr.Mohan Bhat,Managing Director & Co-Founder, Accops Systems Pvt. Ltd,reveals his strategies for business in India .
Nisha Harshwal:-Tell us shortly about the journey of Accops in India right from the first day?
Mr. Mohan Bhat:-We did not have any eureka moment to start Accops. Both of us founders had worked with enterprise products companies and we had seen the challenges of running point product companies from India. All our experience has been into remote access technologies. But we could see that just network access is not enough for enterprises. Users care about access to applications and they need to work over any device, any network. Enterprises gained no benefit by opening the network to users but just wanted users to have access to the intended application. We felt that the secure application domain has lot of potential. So, we jumped on the entrepreneurship bandwagon in 2008. Worst time to start a company as the markets had just crashed. We started as a consulting company for a UK based company, named Propalms. By end of 2012, we decided to start working on our own products and launched “Accops” brand in 2015 based on our own IP. Our services business helped us to fund the development because of which we did not need any venture capital. In last 6 years, we have grown from a 15 people team to 85 people, 500+ customers and 75 channel partners. After India, Japan is our second largest base. We could quickly acquire distributors and resellers in 5 other countries and scale up operations. We have not raised any external funding and we believe not having a large sum of money in our bank account keeps us hungry and keep us on our toes. Our customers are our investors.
Nisha Harshwal:-What are the key differentiators that make Accops different in the market?
Mr. Mohan Bhat:-The current DSCI report lists around 135 cybersecurity startups in India. Doing enterprise IT infrastructure and cybersecurity products in India is not easy. Talent and money both do not come easy for enterprise starts.
First thing we did differently is to build a consistent revenue by consulting services to sustain the company and fund the product development. When we launched the product, we already had around 100+ customers to roll out the new product. Our existing channel network connections in India as well as 5 other countries quickly took the product to new customers.
Secondly, we decided never to say no to a customer. We accepted new challenges from customers and continue building and adapting the product. Having full control of the company meant we could take decisions quickly. Accops decided to not be a point product to solve only one problem but build a comprehensive suite to solve a wider application delivery and access problem.