ITBHUGlobal.org: The Chronicle: Neeraj Kapoor (Electrical 1992) founder of One-Associates

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Company website: www.One-Associates.com

                One-Associates

              102, Hem Opal,

              Mumbai Pune Highway,

              Wakadewadi, Pune-411003 India.

                                            Tel: +91 (20) 25821373; Tel (US): (510) 402-4279

                                            Sales inquiry: sales@one-associates.com

Introduction

The company, One-Associates was started in 2006 with the objective to provide enterprise and business data to users on their Smart phones and mobile phones (BlackBerry & Windows Mobile) while they are on the move. Secondly, the aim was to provide integration of customer address data with Maps, Navigation and GPS information to improve and enhance the productivity of the field force, and at the same time increase revenue for corporate.

The company has received the TATA NEM Hottest Startup Award and 2008 Mobile Village Award. The company has office in Pune and employs about 15 employees.

About the partners (Update 1 dated Jan 09-Neeraj's photo updated)

              (Neeraj Kapoor)                                           (Himanshu Singh)                                   

Neeraj Kapoor (Director – Mobile Solutions)

Neeraj has 15+ years of IT experience with Infosys. Neeraj has lead large teams of 70+ people and programs worth more than 15 Million USD in the areas of CRM Product Management & BI for clients like Apple, DHL and Telstra. He has worked extensively in Australia, India & US. Neeraj brings to One-Associates a deep understanding of building and running large organizations. Neeraj handles the functions of Strategy, Sales & Marketing, finance & HR.

Neeraj did his B. Tech. (Electrical Engineering) from IT-BHU in 1992 and Global Management Program (GMP) from IIM Calcutta in 2007.

Neeraj can be reached at: capoorneeraj@yahoo.com

Himanshu Singh (Director & Principal Architect)

Himanshu has 10 years of IT experience with Infosys in the areas of Data Warehousing (DW) and Business Intelligence for clients like DHL and Gateway. Himanshu is a technologist. He provides technical direction at One Associates and is responsible for Mobile product management

Himanshu has a B. Tech. from IIT-Kanpur in 1998 and Executive MBA from IIM Calcutta in 2006.

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Questions and Answers:

Q-1: When did you start the company, how did you get the idea for this business and who are the partners?

Our company (www.one-associates.com) was started in the year 2006 and while we found that a lot of Mobile companies were offering VAS (Value Added Services) for consumers related to ring tones, games, bulk sms and text messaging. There were few companies who offered mobile services to SME (Small and Medium Enterprises). With the launch of 3G services and high speed data access in markets globally, the need for mobile products which can provide corporate data “Anywhere Anytime” is slowly becoming a norm. Few people are using laptops now to view, search and update information while they are outside the office. Therefore, we entered into a mobile segment which services the corporate and industry that have field sales and service teams. We have partnered with companies which provided LBS (full form?) and GPS data and those partnerships have been forged recently.

Q-2: What types of mobile based services provided by you? What technology do you use?

We provide mobile products. Our mobile CRM product provides following functionality - Users can view, search and update Accounts, Leads, Calls, Meetings, Contacts, Opportunities, Tasks and Notes and data synchronization with backend. Additionally, we’ve generic adapters allowing us to integrate our product with any backend/custom CRM solution. Integrate the software with text readers to read emails and text messages. Our solutions are integrated with Maps and kocation based services to provide rich user experience on mobile phones.

An SOA based architecture and the solution is built on BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), MDS, C# for Windows Mobile, J2ME for Java phones and Objective C for iPhone with GPS and text to voice reader integration. We offer our Mobile CRM product (One mSales) as a stand alone solution as well as SaaS (Software as a Service) Model. This solution is available with Sugar CRM and Saleforce.com. We have build middleware adapters to suitably integrate with any CRM with ease. Users can initially sign up for a monthly subscription for 6 months or they can buy on a per user license fee. Zoom in and Zoom out of Maps and Click to Call.

Q-3: How can your mobile based services and solutions be useful to clients? Who are your typical customers?

Our product is useful to customers as the user doesn’t need to haul up his laptop each time s/he has to search, view and update information from the enterprise system. Our Solution offers following features to clients

Ø    Easy Wireless Deployment & Application Upgrade

Ø    High Secure transmission of Data

Ø    Complete Control over data & application on device.

Ø    Address Information integrated with Maps

Ø    Click to call client from all screens

Ø    Click to email from all screens

Ø    Click to SMS client from all screens

Ø    Easy Upload of Images

Ø    Text to Voice reader for emails, contacts and Addresses

Ø    Location Based Tracking of Field Sales personnel

These aspects of the solution help the user in reducing paper work, reducing the travel, improving the productivity of the field team, improved customer satisfaction, increase in revenue and tracking of field sales team at Anytime Anywhere. Our solutions are highly secure whereby the data on the device can be controlled centrally and transmitted securely via GPRS making it extremely useful for corporate which have to follow high security standards.

Our customers belong to retail, distribution, manufacturing and business services. Our Typical customers are companies who have 10-100 employees who are in the field.  These employees need inventory, customer address, order, invoice details at the point of sales (POS) and using our solution they can easily access this information.

Q-4: Any other aspect you would like to talk about.

At present we are looking for advisors and mentors from the Telecom and Mobile industry as well as people who are successful entrepreneurs. We are looking for partnership with Telecom companies globally to place our product on their application store. ______________________________________________________

The message from Neeraj Kapoor, founder

The objective to write to the readers of this newsletter is to bring to notice of people who are working at Small and Large corporate to deploy Mobile CRM solutions to improve sales and productivity of their teams and company. They should take advantage of the new mobile technology to differentiate your company in the market place. Corporate in Retail, Manufacturing, Business Service and Distribution businesses having large teams of field personnel will hugely benefit from such a solution. Mobile solution can have a huge benefit from a cost reduction as well as revenue generation perspective.

Mobile revolution is the happening at a very rapid pace and a lot of users in the Asian markets will have their first experience of web and corporate information directly on mobiles. With the rollout of 3G networks globally, next 5 yrs are going to see even rapid pace of mobile technology development and deployment. Even in this financial downturn it is companies like Apple, BlackBerry (RIM) who are continuing to grow and hire. Most of the telecommunications companies are seeing drop in growth on Land (Fixed) line revenue but seeing double digit growth in Wireless space with launch of WIMAX and wifi networks.

I would like to tell the students to start thinking about the venture they wish to launch while at college itself. This is the best time for you to write your business plans and evolve your ideas with the professors. You have the luxury to fail and learn from your mistakes therefore, use these 4 yrs to learn and start a new venture with friends and generate employment rather be an employee.

Thanks,

Neeraj Kapoor

One-Associates

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Additional links:

1) Review of One-Associates in MobileVillage.com

http://www.mobilevillage.com/yp/one-associates.htm

2) Red Hat Software Catalog Vendor Profile

https://www.redhat.com/apps/isv_catalog/VendorProfile.html?cat=isv&vendor_id=6187

3) TATA NEN Hottest Startups Awards

http://www.hotteststartups.in/viewandvote.do?method=fetch&businessFn=viewandvote&startupId=629

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