Interviews at The Entrepreneur Center @NVTC

Tania Anderson, for Bisnow on Business: You’ve had a lot of success in technology. What do you think is the most important thing a tech company needs to be successful these days?
The landscape of tech companies in the startup environment has changed dramatically from the late 1990s to where we are today. There is very little white space in terms of unexplored territory that the large vendors have not already staked a position in. What is extremely important for entrepreneurs looking to start new companies is to have a very good sense of where the large companies are, and what value-add exists that new companies or entrepreneurs can provide, and how does that fit into where these bigger companies are going. It may not necessarily be creating brand new technology or intellectual property, as has been very important historically. It might be leveraging new trends in the business. Customer Relationship Management and financial applications are well-staked territories with well entrenched vendors. But what a new company or an entrepreneur might look into is: How do you take these existing applications and deliver them in an on-demand environment like what we’re doing for messaging and collaboration.

What got you interested in technology?
I did my master’s in computer science at Georgia Tech. I graduated in 1989 and I worked for a security software company for five years. Today that company has evolved into being S1 Corporation, a large public company that provides applications to the financial and insurance community. Working there for five years I had a good knowledge base for what it takes to build good applications. But I grew up in India and I did my bachelor’s in computer engineering there. In the early 90s, the whole software services industry in India was just starting to develop. I was reading all these articles about how the industry was growing at a very rapid pace. So I went back in 1993 to survey what companies were doing and I came back disappointed. The entire industry was focused on providing outsourced services. I felt that if the talent was there to provide outsourced services, why shouldn’t that talent base be leveraged to build and deliver products as well? There were companies from Israel and Ireland all over the world building and selling products. That’s what really got me into creating my first company. I felt there was an opportunity to leverage the talent pool in India to create a products and services company. That’s what led to the creation of Entevo in 1994. I grew that successfully over five years and raised over $25 million in venture capital.

Was there anything about your upbringing in India that you got you interested in studying computer science?
My dad had pretty much drilled it into my head that that’s what I should do. When I got out of high school I had been brainwashed enough to not even think about what I wanted to do. There wasn’t another option. I really respect him for that. Growing up in India in the 70s and 80s computers were not even existent at the time. It was a very nascent market even in the U.S. The fact that he kept himself abreast of what global trends were happening and believed that that was the future, and something I should pursue as a career, is what got me into it. I owe it to him that I really got into this industry.

What made him so interested in technology?
Over the years he and I talked about it at length. He was not an engineering graduate. He was an arts major. But he worked for a large oil company for many years and he always felt, while he was reasonably successful in his career, that he was hampered by not having a technical education and background. He didn’t grow as fast as he might have been able to if he had a technology grounding. He was an avid reader, not just books and magazines but national and international newspapers. I think he was a visionary in that even in the 70s he saw that in order to be successful 20-30 years from that time, understanding and having a grounding in computers was going to be essential. That’s why he coached me and pushed me in that direction. He was worried when I left a very good job at the time to start my business. Having grown up and worked all his life as an employee, he was afraid I was getting into territories that may not be genetically inherited from him. He was able to see some of the success I had as an entrepreneur and was always very supportive of everything I did.

What was one of your first experiences with technology?
My very first experience was in college. I joined a computer engineering school to do my bachelor's. At that time there were almost no options other than the Indian Institute of Technology, which was a flourishing technology institute even at that time. There was no other program in the country offering computer science or computer engineering degrees. The college that I went to was brand new; we were the guinea pigs. It was created primarily to offer just computer engineering as a program. The first year we had no computers in our college. The second year - in 1984 - we got a couple of Apple IIs and later on a couple of 486-based PCs. That was my first exposure to what a computer even looked like. In our second year we had an introduction to computers course. As part of the exam, not only did we have a written exam but an oral exam where you sat with an examiner and he asked you questions. One of the guys actually happened to come back to the other students who hadn’t gone for their interview yet. He said, ‘I got asked this question and I have no idea what the answer is.’ The question was ‘Do you know what a mouse is?’ We were like, ‘What’s a mouse? We’ve never heard of a mouse.’ In 1984, we had one PC in the school. Windows did not exist at the time. We didn’t have access to PC Magazine. That was the first exposure to computers. We had these green terminals that we did our programming on. In fact being a part of the engineering program we were taken to a few businesses that had mainframe computers at the time to see what they looked like. I remember we had to take off our shoes and had to cover our heads. You couldn’t get dust into the environment.

Apptix posted record fourth quarter revenue in 2005. What are your goals for this next year?
Our stated goal for the total revenue for 2006 is between $19 million and $21 million. Which is a very big jump from the $8.5 million we did in 2005, but we’re already on a very fast track based on the bookings of the fourth quarter. The primary goal for 2006 is to achieve significant revenue growth. We’re going to continue to look at M&As as an added fuel to grow the business. The next big goal for 2006 is to expand from messaging and collaboration into voice solutions. We’ll be looking to add on the messaging side, enterprise instant messaging. The requirements there are it’s got to be secure, it’s got to be archiveable, and it’s got to be able to connect to multiple IM networks. And then on the voice side, there’s going to be tremendous growth in voice-over-IP. Our goal is to offer small businesses hosted IP-based PBX solutions and integration between voice mail and e-mail. And then voice conferencing and web conferencing solutions. Our footprint will evolve to provide a one-stop shop from a single vendor providing all of these applications in a hosted environment. It covers the gamut from messaging to collaboration to voice solutions.

What exactly does your company do?
What Apptix provides is an outsourced hosted model for messaging and collaboration applications. For example, 80-90 percent of the business community uses Outlook. Outlook as a client on the desktop communicates with a Microsoft Exchange server on the back end that allows you to not only do all your e-mail capabilities but also your calendaring and contacts and shared calendars and things like that. So if you want to use Outlook, you have to install and manage this server on the back end. For a lot of small businesses, the skills required to host and manage their own applications is becoming fairly challenging. We have data centers where we have the servers pre-installed and pre-configured. A small business that doesn’t have the time and resources and capital to buy, install and manage their own Exchange servers, can set up an account with Apptix.

You recently went to India. What was the trip about?
We have a development center that I opened in India in August of last year. You’re probably familiar with the advantages of the offshore development model. The reason that it was attractive to me in particular is my first company, Entevo, had a development center in India in the same city that we’re in now, which is Pune. Every single product that Entevo sold was built in India from our development center there. We had over 100 developers there over five years. The guys who had set up and run the operation there, I was able to attract to work with me to do it again.

Why is Apptix traded on the Oslo Exchange rather than on one in the U.S.?
Apptix was spun out of a Norwegian company in 2002. A company called Telecomputing, which is a public company on the Oslo Stock Exchange. And as part of the divestiture the shareholders required that the new company continue to be listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange. But as we grow we have discussed the matter internally, and one of the goals for the company is to be listed on the NASDAQ Stock Exchange. But I don’t want to rush it. I want to make sure we’re a strong, stable growing company with the right revenue size before we list on NASDAQ.

Where do you see yourself five or 10 years from now?
Five years from now I see myself still running Apptix, but hopefully it’s a much bigger company from a revenue and profits perspective and hopefully a company listed on the NASDAQ. My goal is to take Apptix over $100 million in revenue. Whether that takes three years, four years, five years, I don’t know.

[This interview conducted by Tania Anderson for Bisnow on Business.]