Startup Saturday Hyderabad Nov 13 - Cloud Startups

Startup Saturday Hyderabad once again lived up to its reputation of being an active forum for startups in the city. Today's session was very topical - Cloud Startups. The objective of the session was beautifully articulated by Priyanka in her invitation email: "A peek into Hyderabad Startups dabbling in the cloud. Building solutions in SaaS model, running on the cloud (Amazon/Google App engine/++) and building utilities/tools/infrastructure for the cloud. Innovative solutions on cloud. Addressing key challenges in the biz models for cloud solutions and tech challenges."

Ramesh Loganathan, VP (Products) and Head of Progress Software (India), kick-started the session with a quick round of introduction. C. Chaitanya from Ozonetel introduced his product KooKoo, a cloud-based platform as a service product. KooKoo is an Inbound and Outbound IVR telephony platform that allows users to build and manage their telephony application themselves using web technology of their choice leveraging existing web infrastructure. Learn more about the product.

The speaker of the day was Satish Madhira. Satish has gone through the full startup life cycle. He has earlier founded Yasu Technologies, ran it successfully for 10 years, and then sold it successfully to SAP in 2007. Now he runs ICUMI Technologies Pvt Ltd that operates the Dealivore service. Satish talked about 'Emerging Cloud Business models' with special emphasis on 'Gaming Models in the Cloud.' The participants had a whole lot of questions for Satish, ranging from back-end technologies to front-end expertise to Dealivore's business model.

The next presenter was Ripul Kumar from Kern Communications Pvt Ltd. Ripul presented Kern's latest cloud-based educational technology offering. He described how a "non-technology" company could successfully develop and implement a technology solution leveraging the cloud-based infrastructure. He outlined how cloud-computing was the right solution for a company's quick and agile development needs. Cloud-based solution is cost-effective, highly scalable, and extremely reliable without the burden of maintenance, installation, and managing the back-end. He ended the session with a quick demo of the application. The session closed with a lightening pitch by CitizenSocial. Nirmala Govindan (advisory team member CIE) introduced CitizenSocial currently incubated at IIIT. Unfortunately, I could not attend the last part, thanks to my three-year old who had enough of cloud-startup gyan by now. It will be great if the participants could update us about their pitches here for the benefit of those who missed it.

The best part about Startup Saturday is the opportunity to meet up old friends, ex-colleagues, and build a network within the fraternity.