オルタナティブ・ブログ > 坂本史郎の【朝メール】より >

ビジネスモバイルITベンチャー実録【朝メール】から抜粋します

CACHATTO is boomeranging back to India

»

In the year 2000, when I founded e-Jan, Japan was amid an IT bubble. It was hard to find good engineers in Japan so we decided to get our software developed in India with a local company there. As a result, we spent a lot of money, but couldn't come up with any good services. Despite that, I still took another risk with developing CACHATTO's initial version in India. After releasing the initial version in order to keep up with Japanese customers' requirements, I had engineers from India come to work with us in Japan.

As time went by, I realized the difficulties with outsourced engineers; the longer it took to develop a product, the better it was for them, but the worse it was for us. Luckily, one of the Indian engineers, who worked on CACHATTO from the very beginning, officially joined the company in 2005. Since then, the speed of development and improvement changed dramatically. CACHATTO became capable not only of feature-phone business-emails, but also in other portals, OTP, RSA, etc. We even made the system compatible PC portals. In 2006, we invented and delivered Scure Browser, which as of now, many competitors follow its concept.

After observing the Indian engineer's output, an ex-Sony engineer decided to join the team. His knowledge related to the Internet helped us decide our path. Another engineer was taking care of all the apps on devices. The UI was taken care of by a web designer. The development team was crude. We had an ex-Honda employee, and a guy from Aomori taking care of customer support. We outsourced our sales activities, created a price structure, and established a line of resellers. The business stepped into a stage of growth and profits, many Japanese customers liked our product, our team became larger, and our position in the domestic market became solid.

Our customers in Japan said, "We need global sales and support, otherwise we would need to abandon CACHATTO and use some another global product." So in 2014, we founded "E-Jan International" in Singapore, and deals outside Japan were made through that company. However, I started to doubt the business sustainability because we were not well-known in the targeted areas, the market size was limited or security was not one of their concerns yet, and we weren't able to find the right propelling partners.

In 2017, we rebuilt our strategy to deal with the global market. The areas we pursue should be divided into two segments. Pursuing Japanese affiliated companies and local companies. Since we already had quite a few Japanese subsidiaries using CACHATTO, it was a clear path in Chinese market. However, for non-related local companies, we'd target India.

We started our activities in India this April. We officially registered "e-Jan Japan" in Bangalore and we were able to form a good team to penetrate the market. I am currently thinking of hiring some engineers to support the activities there. There have been several PoCs (Proof of Concepts) conducted to see the potential of CACHATTO and the feedback has been quite encouraging. On top of that, what analysts at Gartner said about CACHATTO was encouraging too; "This product would sell well in India as this has concepts of "Software Defined Perimeter", "Cloud Access Security Broker", and "New Generation VPN" combined in a single product."

I am quite confident that the operation in India will be a successful one, even though there are many challenges. Isn't it interesting to see a product which was originally invented in Japan, made in India, and improved in Japan, boomeranging back to the Indian market? CACHATTO has a long history with India

Comment(0)