CEOCFO Magazine – The Most Powerful Name In Corporate News and Information
An Interview conducted by: Lynn Fosse, Senior Editor, CEOCFO Magazine, Published – January 5, 2015
CEOCFO: What is nuVizz?
Mr. Rao: nuVizz is an enterprise mobile software solutions company. At the core, we are consultants and along with our experience of working with enterprises, we bring the latest mobile technology, to help them accelerate their adoption of mobile technology.
CEOCFO: Who is typically coming to you for your services? What types of companies and industries?
Mr. Rao: If you look at it from a technology standpoint, what we do is industry agnostic. Mobile technology today cuts across industry verticals. At the same time, when we are talking about enterprise mobile technology, we also understand the challenges involved in making enterprise mobile solutions work in the enterprise applications ecosystem. This is very important when we are trying to mobilize business processes. We predominantly cater to enterprises in retail, manufacturing, distribution and utilities. From a technology standpoint though, we can provide solutions for any industry vertical.
CEOCFO: Would you give us an idea of a common engagement and something outside the box?
Mr. Rao: Before I talk about the kind of solutions that we provide for our customers, it is important to understand what is happening today in enterprise mobility space.
When you look at mobility in the B2E (Business to Employee) space, there is a great deal of demand. Enterprises have started looking at ways to leverage mobile technology and provide their employees tools to do their work in real-time and more efficiently. However, the enterprise IT is not able to meet the growing demand because of a few reasons.
First, there is serious fragmentation in this space with devices, OS and technology solutions.
Second, unlike the traditional application space, where you usually have a packaged application, in the mobile space there is not many readily available off the shelf mobile applications.
With that background, when enterprises get requests from their business owners for a mobile solution, the first thing they do is to try to build on their own. The challenges with building start with choosing a mobile platform, resources to build the solution and then deployment and on-going maintenance that go with it. These are difficult decisions to make, especially given the nascent state of technology solutions.
That is exactly where we at nuVizz come in to play. We understand the demand and we understand the challenges that IT organizations are running into in meeting those demands.
We have line of business mobile solutions that are offered in our cloud as SaaS products. Then, for solutions that our customers are planning to build, we come to the table with a unique approach. We call our approach, mWork, which is short for “mobile work by design”. Our engagement with customers starts with educating them and trying to understand where they are in their mobile journey and what they are planning to build. Then we leverage our comprehensive mobile platform to build the solution. However, the best part of it is that customers do not have to pay for the platform itself. Rather we focus on providing the end business solution that our customers are looking for.
Then last and important part of our offering is that we host that solution in our cloud. That makes that customer our first customer for the product and they will get the benefit of a hosted SaaS solution. Then we create a community of users around that solution where everyone gets to benefit.
In short, with our “Mobile Work by Design”, we provide enterprises the flexibility of building with the benefits of buying mobile solutions along with on-going deployment and maintenance.
CEOCFO: Technology changes so often. How do you build a solution when in six months something could come to market that will make it better? How do you use the tools today, yet be prepared for the future?
Mr. Rao: That is a great question. That is exactly where enterprises are stuck today. They do not want to invest in mobile platforms for exactly the same reason as you said. Because six months down the road there is going to be another, better platform. That is because this market is not mature. Enterprises are thinking about their business. We think about mobile technology 24/7, every day. We continuously keep up with the technology and keep upgrading our platform. As device and OS vendors come up with upgrades, we make sure that our solutions are compatible. Then we leverage the new features and make them better. With our approach, we are continuously working on the platform and giving the benefits of that to all of our products and all of our customers, but at same time, as I said before, our customers are not paying for the platform itself.
CEOCFO: On your website, it lists some clients with well-known names. How do you reach potential customers, how do they find you and how to you attract name companies?
Mr. Rao: We are fortunate to have worked in this space for twenty plus years and created a network that helped us land those customers. They recognize our expertise and our dedication to our customers’ success.
In addition, enterprises recognize that in technology areas like enterprise mobility, innovation is going to come from smaller companies. They specifically look for companies like nuVizz, who are niche players in this area, who think about mobility day-in and day-out. Time to market is critical in this space, because as we discussed earlier, technology is changing so fast, but large companies cannot really move that fast. However, companies like nuVizz can work in an agile fashion and make it happen.
CEOCFO: nuVizz was recently recognized by CIOReview as One of the “20 Most Promising Enterprise Mobility Consulting Companies”. Why is this recognition important?
Mr. Rao: It is one of the things that we are proud of, because it is coming from the CIOs. When you are talking about CIOs, they are in the midst of these technology challenges that we have talked about and they look at companies in that light. We typically start working with the business owners when we start talking about an engagement. Because we are talking about mobile technology, which is strategic to many organizations today, CIOs are by default going to be involved. Therefore, having been recognized by such leaders is a matter of pride for us.
CEOCFO: Why be excited for the future of nuVizz?
Mr. Rao: I really think we are ahead of the curve. If you look at the vendor space today, I categorize them into three buckets. One is infrastructure vendors that provide solutions such as MDM to manage devices. Then there is pure software platform players, who you would buy the platform from and leverage it to build apps. The third is the custom mobile solution development companies. Enterprises that are looking at mobile business solutions are left with the daunting task of trying to make sense and bring all these together.
Where nuVizz is today is a unique place with a unique approach. We bring a comprehensive approach that includes helping companies build a solution by leveraging the platform at no cost, deep understanding of the backend integration and then on top of that provide the deployment and management capabilities.
I am excited about where we are today. This message is new and is catching on. A great mobile technology platform is an asset. In addition, the experience of building and managing line of business solutions for thousands of users in our cloud adds merit to our claim of helping our customers’ solutions in the cloud.
