Telerik leverages India office to connect with developers
The past few years have seen exponential growth for Telerik, the company that builds tools for agile project management, collaboration, development, and testing allowing companies of all sizes to create rich, stable and aesthetic software. Telerik now has over 100,000 customers in 94 countries.
Last year, Telerik opened local offices in Gurgaon, India as well as Hudson, USA and Copenhagen, Denmark.
Abhishek Kant, country manager at Telerik India explained the need for expansion into India was partly because it hosted the second largest developer population in the world. "And since our tools are geared towards making developers more productive, it is obvious that our products would be widely used in India. In our support system, one of the largest set of people asking questions has always been from India. So, we already knew that there is a sizeable interest in the Telerik products from India."
"Having our feet on the ground in India has allowed us to establish strong local partnerships, for example with CSC and Idealake. We have additionally signed many new enterprise customers such as Infosys, Cognizant, Honeywell, Dell and Symantec," the country manager added.
India a strategic market
I wondered if a local office in a region was required for a company which sells products and services online. Telerik anyway has had decent visibility in the developer ecosystem in India owing to its presence as an exhibitor, sponsor, and speaker at some of the top industry and community events.
Abhishek, who worked as the community program manager at Microsoft prior to joining Telerik to set up the India office explained: "Since India is one of the biggest developer markets, opening a local office here was not a question of 'should we', but 'when'. Our local presence now allows us to engage directly with and be part the local developer community, and to truly know their needs."
Telerik India is currently serves more as a sales and marketing organization, but could include support and product development in future.
Interestingly, Telerik offers a good proposition for small and midsized businesses (SMBs) in India. The need for SMBs to stretch the penny makes Telerik tools a lucrative option for them. Telerik believes its tools allow them to do more with less and its transparent pricing makes decision-making faster for the SMBs.
The products are immediately available for download through an online purchase with a credit card. "We believe that this online distribution model will do us good in the long term," Abhishek added.
Steve Forte, Chief Strategy Officer at Telerik, is looking to ride the rising trend of mobile in India. "Specifically, building line of business (LOB) apps via HTML5 and JavaScript on top of Phonegap. This is due to the enterprise's discovery of mobile for internal and external productivity apps and the willingness to outsource these to their independent software vendors (ISVs) in India."
"To support these trends in India, Telerik is investing heavily in hybrid development as well as providing a lot of new learning resources from our evangelist staff based in Bangalore and New Delhi," Forte said.