Praveen Kankariya founded Impetus Infotech (India) Pvt. Ltd., in India, in the year 1991, and Impetus Technologies Inc., in U.S.A., in the year 1996. He is the visionary responsible for the success of these ventures. He has also founded a service supply chain optimization software company- Servigistics, in Atlanta. With over 17 years of experience in developing large distributed systems, Praveen has conceived, designed, and implemented several software products. He was one of the first employees of Scientific Computing Associates' Linda parallel processing product group, and has implemented the Linda kernel on several parallel architectures. While working with 3M Corporation, he designed and developed a distributed version of the Sage field service scheduler for 24X7 business critical operations.

Praveen was awarded a Masters degree in Computer Science from the Michigan State University and holds a Bachelors degree in Computer Engineering from S.G.S.I.T.S., India.

1. What would you say will be the next big trend in the area of product development?
Ans: We are increasingly witnessing convergence across multiple devices, and across various modes of communication. Software products of the times to come will be products that either enable convergence, or have multiple applications embedded into single application functionality, making it possible for users to share, interact and collaborate, much more easily and across different media. We are already witnessing this in the emerging technology space – trends such as mobile applications and web 2.0 businesses are making technology enabled sharing and collaboration a reality. What is also worth noting is the fact that new age technologies and products are not limited only to technical users – even lay users can access their potential and benefit from the immense opportunities that these products offer.

At Impetus, we have a special focus on emerging technologies and domains. Things like Digital Advertising, Human Collaboration, Crowd Sourcing, Rich Media, are some example of the kind of new age work our engineering teams are working on.

2. What do you see as the “only sustainable edge” for IT companies going forward?
Ans: The IT industry today is very competitive. To survive, each company needs to carve a niche of its own. There is an increasing need to specialize and become an expert in a chosen domain, rather than trying to be a generalist, appealing to all. This becomes even more imperative in case of small and medium sized enterprises. Impetus is a Software Product Development company and we pioneered the trend of Offshore Product Development in India. We create award-winning software products using cutting-edge and emerging technologies. We believe that research and innovation are two key factors that will help a software company to grow and prosper and maintain competitive in the days to come. To this end, we have created an internal research division, Impetus Labs or iLabs that focuses on emerging technologies in the product development arena. It is responsible for exploring new technology domains like mobile, wireless, new media, speech, web 2.0, IPTV and VOIP etc. iLabs is also working on developing proof of concepts for new product ideas and prototyping new products, which can possibly be later spun off as independent product teams.

3. Talent management is a concern area for Industry, what is your company doing to cope with it?
Ans: Finding the right talent to keep up with the market opportunities as well as internal growth plans is certainly a challenge. However, for us getting people is not as much an issue, as it is to get the right people who have the attitude and aptitude to develop innovative software products. What has worked for us is the very high end and interesting work that our people get to do – the quality of work is far ahead of the vanilla services that are almost a norm in the industry today. So, people who really like to be hands-on in technology and continuously challenge their gray cells choose to work for a company like ours. At the same time, we have always created and professed a flexible and open work culture that gives employees a lot of liberty and freedom. That, combined with the facilities that we provide and our employee friendly work environment help us attract and retain talent.

4. Tier 2 cities are next destination for most IT companies for various reasons. Do you have plans to tap that market and resources?
Ans: Impetus has presence in 3 Indian cities where we have our off-shore development facilities; Noida, Hyderabad and Indore. We started our operations from Indore, which is considered as a Tier II city in the IT parlance. Our Indore development centre has showed immense potential and we have more than 500 employees in the 3 centres at Indore. We now have plans to set up our own campus that can accommodate more than 2500 people. We have also been in talks with the government authorities with regard to acquiring a significant amount of space in the proposed IT Park coming up in Indore. Impetus’ Hyderabad facility is comparatively small and our Noida facility has grown to two centres with a potential to house 500 software engineers.

5. Industry has been participating with academia to make workforce employable, one such activity taken up by you is with IIM Indore. Share some details about it.
Ans: Impetus and IIM Indore have entered into “Memorandum of Understanding” that enables Impetus to establish a “Center of Excellence” in the area of Information Technology. Impetus has instituted an “Impetus Chair of Information Technology and Systems”.

The Chair will provide a collaborative framework for performing applied research, industry practices analysis, sharing knowledge and conducting specific projects of mutual benefit. This association will provide avenues for adequate grooming of the next tier of mid level leadership and management bandwidth for Impetus, and at the same time allow IIMI students to gain valuable industry perspective. The agreement shall facilitate better academic-industry alliance through organizing and participating in joint conferences, workshops, courses and other initiatives of mutual interest.

6. Do you intend to go along acquisition path for expansion or will it be organic in nature?
Ans: We are currently growing at a rate of over 50% year after year. Our growth target for next is year is again in the same range, and this will be organic growth. Plans of growing by acquisition are still under consideration and nothing conclusive can be shared at this point of time.