Tutor vista charges a flat rate of $100 per month across any subjects against offline tutoring solutions by firms like Sylvan offering at $300 – $400 for 6 hours program in USA.  Ganesh says the offline highly priced tutoring can only meet the needs of a smaller section of market which is basically Affordable Rich + academically Poor Student (intersection) whereas his online low cost tutoring would be of interest to anyone who is keen to improve their academics. The whole idea behind pricing at a fixed $100 across any subjects for unlimited number of hours is to give peace of mind to parents and make it as part of their monthly budget.

One of the primary challenge in implementing this $100 per month unlimited scheme is to avoid misuse where a person paying $100 sells to 10 other people for $20 each by sharing his online login and password. Some of the mechanism implemented by Tutorvista to handle this is very interesting

• The system does a basic IP Address check to see whether it is misused. Couple of IPs (home, school) used interchangeably is acceptable but a wide range of IPs used to access Tutorvista using the same ID is a good indication of misuse
• To verify whether it is the same student, they also record the teaching and verify the consistency in the kinds of questions asked by students across multiple online sessions he is taking ( A student asking an advanced question in session 2 against a basic question in session 4 of the same topic is contradictory)
• A fair use policy agreement which protects tutorvista from anyone misusing the buffet flexibility offered by them

The next major challenge is hiring qualified teachers. Tutor vista does the entire process of hiring and managing teachers through their online platforms and looks like many of the teachers haven’t been met by tutorvista team face to face even once. The online platform provides flexibility

• To conduct online test to qualify the basic knowledge of teachers in a given subject
• Online tests to ascertain potential teacher’s communication and interactivity skills
• If they pass the above they are subjected ~ 60 hours of online training on US accent, culture, using the online platform to deliver the training etc
• After the training the teacher has to go clear the certification exams to become a qualified tutorvista teacher
• Teachers have to opt for either full time or ½ day dedicated programs only. They don’t accept part-time teachers as Ganesh doubts their sincerity in handling the same
• Once accepted teachers are rated online on every class they conduct by the students to access their performance
• Depending on their performance level, appropriate expert coaching is provided to help them to improve in areas they lack
• It also provides an excellent online collaboration platform whereby teachers can interact with each other leveraging their past experience to handle tough students / their queries

Those are some of the ways and means to handle the Supply side of the business

On the demand side, Ganesh says one of the key challenges they faced while they started is all about acquiring customers as they are the first Indian B2C company entering the foreign markets (Infosys, Wipro etc are more B2B companies). The way they managed this problem is to hire a team of 36 people to bid for more than 1,000,000 keywords in internet search engines like Google on daily basis to position tutorvista at the top spot to ensure maximum click-through and conversion ratio. During tough initial months he says they have spent more than 5 Crores in advertisement to attract revenue of only 50 lakhs.

Ganesh feels they key success factor / differentiator is the strength of online platform.  He illustrated this with a fantastic example.

Let us assume on Sunday morning 3 AM IST there is scheduled class between a student in Cincinnati and a teacher in Tirupathi, India. Obviously it is a very early morning in India and anything can go wrong like teacher falling sick, internet breakdown, power failure etc hampering the scheduled class. Their online platform handles this situation in an efficient manger

• Platform checks whether at 2:55 AM the teacher has logged in
• If the teacher hasn’t logged in, it immediately sends a SMS alerting the teacher about the class
• If the teacher hasn’t login till 2:57, an automate phone call goes to teachers landline / mobile number to alert him
• If still no response, the system automatically identifies the next qualified teacher among the pool of more than 3000 teachers who can handle the subject
• Once the system finds the next available and qualified teacher, the system passes the complete history of the student to the new teacher including last class handled, the open questions to be resolved etc so that the new teacher is fully prepared to handle the student
• The new teacher would be online in next couple of minutes to handle the planned session with the student
• The student is informed about the change in teacher and he has an option to either reschedule it or continue with the new teacher
• When the above all happens automatic by the platform, a 24 X 7 control room tries to reach the originally planned teacher for next few hours continuously
• If they are not able to reach all classes scheduled to be handled by that teacher are assigned to equivalent well qualified teacher
• If the above repeats with the same teacher for more than three times, teacher is disqualified

Similarly due to the unlimited buffet model, there could be problems with the students too where students doesn’t show up for the scheduled classes whereas the teacher is available as the students can request for any number of classes for $100 they pay per month. In those cases, Ganesh handles it in an interesting manger

• Students are awarded points if they attend the scheduled classes promptly where the points can be reimbursed for future subscription
• Student’s parents are intimated about the no show by student
• Punctual students are provided facility to schedule the classes in less than a week whereas for non punctual ones a minimal lead time of 4 weeks. The above are to drive positive student behaviour
• Apart from above tutorvista also provides 2 streams of tutoring. Scheduled session and unscheduled ones (Connect now). If a student doesn’t appear, then the teacher is assigned to unscheduled ones thereby effectively utilizing the teachers time and at the same time improving the customer satisfaction
• Also they used to overbook for the same teacher like airline ticketing to handle no-shows  on basis of historical data and handle it the no-shows in same manner as airlines

Thus in net though the business model as such looks like easily imitable, Ganesh and team has built a solid platform to build a strong barrier for others competitors to easily enter and replicate the success. Now with Pearson tie-up, they have much wider reach like every Pearson published book has advertisement and one touch connect option to get hooked to tutorvista.

In net it was a wonderful guest lecture by K Ganesh highlighting the role of operational excellence as a key differentiating factor for a successful e-business model connecting thousands of teachers and students online every day.

The key parameters to evaluate a typical online web-store like flipkart.com are below

• Average revenue it makes per customer
• Contribution margin per customer (product revenue – product variable cost)/ product revenue)
• Acquisition cost per customer
• Customer churn rate, percent

On the listed parameters, one and two are pretty straightforward to understand, three is the average money the company spends to attract one new customer  (Advertisement & marketing expenses) and four is how long the customer remains loyal to flipkart.com for their purchases against switching to a competing online or offline stores

The primary logic to depend on the above than other conventional revenue or profit parameters / ratios are listed below

• Typically the growth potential to scale-up for these online web-stores compared to offline stores in future is very high (offline stores have a huge fixed cost to set-up their stores) and hence revenue can grow multi-fold in future without a need for a huge capital and
• Their current profits would be in red for many years due to very high sales & marketing expenses as they try to establish their presence in market space

The above is true for even www.amazon.com which was in red for many years before it started making profit. One of the well known secrets about all these newly launched online stores is that their current as well as future margins would be negative for many years as they spend a whole lot of money to attract new customers and their only hope on return on profitability in future are on basis of their ability to ensure their newly acquired customers would buy more and more from them and they can retain them as long as possible. That is true too as Amazon returned to profitability after many years betting on the same assumptions but those assumptions may not hold true for every new web-store. If these assumptions are true, then may be the exorbitant valuation these companies quote for IPO may hold good as they offer a significant year on year returns over a period of time, otherwise you have to forget your investment.

Let us try to analyse the above a bit more clinically with an example. Assume there are two flipkarts. One is loyalty.flipkart.com and another is turnover.flipkart.com.  As the name suggests the loyalty.flipkart.com attracts new customer with less money and capable of retaining them for a long time by providing a better value for money. On the other hand turnover.flipkart.com has more revenue per customer and spends 25% more than the loyalty.flipkart.com to acquire a new customer & find it a bit difficult to retain their newly customer. Assuming both are coming to IPO, they make exactly same overall revenue and operating losses.

Now it become tricky to chose between these two as on one-hand turnover.flipkart.com makes better revenue per customer but struggling to acquire and retain new customers on the other hand loyalty.flipkart.com gets less revenue per customer but able to easily acquire new customers and retain the customer longer by offering better value for money. Also for time being let us assume both are able to acquire new customers at the same rate in future too as the market is big (scope for converting offline to online is high).

In this situation the best way to chose between them is to calculate the lifetime value of the customer. The details of the calculation are given below and the winner is loyalty.flipkart.com with net present value of customer lifetime value of ₹ 648.92 against turnover.flipkart.com’s ₹ -556.59.

So in future of you see investment options in these online companies look out for the above parameters and more importantly understand their value proposition to see how easily they can acquire and retain acquired customers in a sustainable manner. If you are not convinced on these parameters better don’t invest in it.

Adopted from the article: “Valuing dot-coms” by Driek Desmet, Tracy Francis, Alice Hu, M. Koller and George A. Riedal

As a VC advisor he shared details on what a Venture Capitalist firm look for in a Business Plan to get it funded. The broad key must to have components of a business plan are below

• Problem definition
• Solution
• Market
• Team
• Opportunities & Threats
• Financials

Problem definition is a must and without that defined in detail, no VC would keen to sit and listen the rest of story. Under problem definition detail out

• The impact of the problem
• Extent of pain
• Cause of Pain and
• Benefits of relief

All the above should be supported with good quality of data from multiple sources and validated as a real pain by potential customer. An easy to comprehend example could a drug manufacturing firm attempting to discover a molecule that could provide relief for patients suffering from some new infection.

Next comes the solution. As part of Solution, explain

• The approach
• Alternative solutions available / possible
• Reason for you to select a specific solution and
• Extent of relief that a potential customer gets from the solution

One interesting point to be noted in solution definition is if the extent of relief from your solution is only incremental or if your solution is not differentiated from others (say by patent protection) or solution cannot be inserted into the market in a plug and play mode without any disruption to the current ecosystem or it requires evolving new technology standards to implement it, it may not be of interest to a VC

Under markets define

• Addressable market
• Industry growth rate
• Barriers to the competition
• Customer readiness
• Expected market share

One subtle point to be noted is every product would have a competition in some form or other. Even if it is a completely revolutionary consumer product like iPhone / iPad the competition would be the other product which takes a share in your wallet like a washing machine or refrigerator. So while defining the market parameters ensure you don’t miss out the competition.  Similarly you aiming for a smaller market share in a bigger market is of interest to VCs than a larger market share in a smaller market as the second carries a higher downside risk if thing doesn’t go well.

From team stand point, the key parameters are below

• Number of co-founders between 2 to 5 (one is not preferred as if that one founder gets into some trouble there won’t be any one to run the business)
• Collective work experience of more than 20 years
• Relevant work experience in the same domain / market
• Team balance to handle various aspects like sales & marketing, finance, operations etc
• Prior start-up experience (He values failed start-up experience than successful ones as he would have learnt a lot to handle it better next time whereas one who was successful could be lucky by chance)
• Interplay between members with 1 consensus building leader
• Idea VS Goal (Mix of people who can sketch big picture as well as able to do meticulous detailed planning)

On opportunities and threats stand point, VCs preferences are below

• A solution for un-regulated markets (no government restrictions)
• No monopoly vendor
• No gorilla competition (not fighting against Microsoft or Google in their space),
• Time to market (shorter is better) and
• Potential applications of solutions across multiple domains

Though financials are least important in your first meeting with the VCs , ensure you have reasonable answers on the below aspects

• Milestone based cash flow needs
• Return on investment
• Expected market share
• Spend outlay (late loading is preferred) and
• Detailed costing assumptions

Though there are no strict weightage defined for each of the categories and sub-categories the emphasis on quality of team and VCs comfortness in sharing the board room with the entrepreneurs over 5 to 8 years duration is a key parameter carrying higher weight. In rate cases a single impressive parameter can completely outweigh the rest depending on the situation / context.

Services based business plan are of least interest to VCs unless you have some key differentiation factors that are tough to imitate easily by others.

In net I felt these are very useful inputs for anyone who likes to become an entrepreneur or grow as an Intrepreneur in an Organization. Share your thoughts / experience if any ….

That’s the title of Vanguard founder John Bogle’s fantastic book about measuring what counts in life.

The title, as Bogle explains, comes from a conversation between Kurt Vonnegut and novelist Joseph Heller, who are enjoying a party hosted by a billionaire hedge fund manager. Vonnegut points out that their wealthy host had made more money in one day than Heller ever made from his novel Catch-22. Heller responds: “Yes, but I have something he will never have ……… enough.”

I thought about this line over the past week after two business stories, neither of them new, re-entered the media’s spotlight.

The first is news that former McKinsey boss Rajat Gupta is being charged with insider trading.

If you’re unaware of Gupta’s story, here’s the background: He was born in Calcutta to a journalist father and school teacher mother, both of whom died in his teens. He received an engineering degree from India’s exceedingly competitive IIT school, moved to America, scored an MBA from Harvard, and in 1973 joined the McKinsey Co., one of the world’s most prestigious consulting firms. He was named McKinsey’s managing director

– the equivalent of CEO — in 1994, a position he held until 2003.

McKinsey isn’t a public company, so we have no idea how much Gupta earned during his tenure. One has to assume, however, that he’s worth, tens, probably hundreds, of millions of dollars.

He was successful. Rich. Respected. He had achieved more than most can dream of against incredible obstacles.

So what does he do in his golden years?

After retiring from McKinsey, Gupta joined the board of directors of several organizations, including Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS), Procter & Gamble (NYSE: PG), and American Airlines (NYSE: AMR). Public filings show he made as much as $2 million annually for his board work, which usually entails attending a few meetings a year.

Fast-forward to September 2008. As the financial system teetered on collapse, Goldman’s board was summoned for a conference call to discuss Berkshire Hathaway’s (NYSE: BRKB) potential $5 billion lifeline investment. This was intensely secret information. And you have to remember how insane this week was. People really didn’t know whether banks, including Goldman, would make it to the next day. Berkshire’s investment was huge for Goldman. Anyway, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Gupta disconnected from the board’s meeting and immediately called billionaire hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam from the same phone. Less than a minute later, Rajaratnam bought 175,000 Goldman shares. The SEC doesn’t say what the two discussed on the call.

You can guess. Rajaratnam netted nearly a $1 million profit the next day after the public learned of Berkshire’s investment.

This is just one example of several. There were more meetings, more calls, more profits. The list goes on and on. The SEC claims Gupta’s tips led to $17 million in gains for Rajaratnam. All of it insider trading, all of it very illegal.

Assuming the allegations are true (he denies the charges), Gupta could be in a heap of trouble. He’ll probably be on the hook for millions in legal bills. His reputation is utterly shot. This from a guy who could have, and should have, spent retirement basking in his success while drinking a Corona on the beach.

The next story I’ve been thinking of comes from a recent New York Magazine interview with Bernie Madoff. You don’t need an introduction.You know what he did.

What shocked me from the interview is the revelation that Madoff earned as much as $100 million a year from the legitimate part of hisbusiness

– market making — before his Ponzi scheme ever began.

Think about that. Adjusted for inflation, Madoff was making the equivalent of $550,000 per day from legitimate sources. The guy was rolling. He had everything. Tons of money. Several homes. A family who adored him. Peers who idolized him — the epitome of success. Yet he apparently wanted more so badly that it was worth tearing the throats out of his friends and family, spending the rest of his life in prison, and even sparking the death of his son, who committed suicide in December. It’s spectacularly confusing.

Explain it to me To a certain extent, theft — white collar or otherwise

– makes sense for those who are truly desperate. Warren Buffett once noted that, despite his commitment to ethics, he wouldn’t rule out holding up a store if he were broke, had two sick kids at home, and an empty kitchen.

You do what you gotta do. It’s why there’s a correlation between poverty and crime.

But to quote Buffett again, who once ridiculed a different group of defunct financiers: “To make money they didn’t have and didn’t need, they risked what they did have and did need. And that’s foolish. It is just plain foolish. If you risk something that is important to you for something that is unimportant to you, it just does not make any sense.”

When people like Gupta and Madoff, who were already rich beyond belief, steal from others (indirectly or literally), you have to ask:

What is the motive? Is it power? Maybe, but both already had layers of power before they misbehaved. Maybe they feel above the law? Could be, although Madoff mentioned before his arrest that, “In today’s regulatory environment, it’s virtually impossible to violate rules.” Maybe they’re just clinical sociopaths? Perhaps, but I’m not convinced it’s that simple.

There’s something else. For some reason, these people don’t feel like they have enough. Many, many of us don’t, even when we should. Why, I don’t know.

Here’s what we do know. In the field of positive psychology, the study of what motivates people and makes us happy, researchers are mostly in

agreement: Money isn’t the key to happiness.

What really gives people meaning and happiness is a combination of four

things:

*     Control over what they’re doing;

*     Progress in what they’re pursuing;

*     Being connected with others;

*     And being part of something they enjoy that’s bigger than

themselves.

Keep that in mind, and I want to ask you: What is enough? How much is enough money? How much is enough success? There’s no right answer; everyone’s different.

When I was in college in the seventies during every winter the migratory birds in academia used to come to India from Europe/USA during Dec/Jan and impart wisdom to the lowly Indians. The white variety is the most preferred but the Indians in phoren institutions were also fine. The talk used to be on “American Economic models”/ “European Economic systems”   and “Indian Economic problems”. India was sold to Indians as a problem. That is the initiation for me into terminological terrorism.  Next came the most bizarre identification of our abysmal economic growth of the sixties and seventies as “Hindu rate of growth”. The Marxian economist Raj Krishna is the originator of this spurious and dangerous title since the economic growth rate during that period can better be called “ Nehruvian growth rate” since it was the direct result of the policies of Nehru and his advisors who wanted to usher in a “ Socialistic Pattern of society”

But alas the name has stuck to the extent some contemporary experts comment that if PM does not act swiftly in allowing foreign investments in our economy we may lapse again in to the Hindu rate of growth. Nobody seems to ask whether the recent growth rates of more than 8 percent are Christian or Jewish growth rate? The Marxists as is their wont wanted to spew venom on everything connected to Hindu civilization and culture and found that this the easy way to abuse the people and the faith in one stroke and everybody jumped into this without even thinking.

Then there is this categorization called “organized” and “unorganized” in our National income Statistics and other economic literature. In the service sector for whatever reason the experts in Government consider corporate form of organizations as “organized”. There is an Udupi restaurant near my home that opens at 7 am and closes at 10 pm every day throughout the year. He closes for half a day in an year for Ganesh Puja. He serves Idli and Dosa of consistent quality throughout the day.  Hold your breath—He is categorized as “unorganized” giving an impression that he is disorganized and needs to be bleached by global practices! Government is classified as “organized”—Can there be a more irony than this? Nearly 90 percent of India is self-employed and from that point of view whole of India is “unorganized”. This is the terminological terrorism imposed by IMF and World Bank on unsuspecting Indians.  In every TV debate and seminar people pontificate about ‘unorganized sector’ and how to make them “organized” without realizing what they are talking about. So the arguments go that we need Wal-Mart’s to organize trade, we need McDonalds to organize restaurant business we need Grey-hounds to organize transport of human beings etc. Incidentally our families are part of the “unorganized” sector as per the economic experts and I really do not know what is the suggestion to make it “organized” –May be by breaking up of the family system as in the west. As they say it –Give the dog a bad name and then hang it from the nearest lamp post.

Another of these terminological terrorism is about medicine /yoga/education etc. It is assumed that Allopathy is the only acceptable form of medication and so other systems like Ayurveda are called alternate medicines and we swallow the idea hook line and sinker and repeat the same ad-nauseum. We do not argue that our medical tradition is the main stream and others are alternate systems. Yoga is considered as alternate form of therapy to keep ourselves fit.  The tragic part is that we Indians have also internalized this terminological terrorism and use it without thinking about the implications.

It is like the newspaper reports mentioning that the “bird hits the plane” when actually it is the plane which hits the bird since the sky is the original and natural habitat of the birds.

The family is a burden in the Western system today and Children are encumbrances or constraints. Our mainstream media also uses this terminology without thinking about the implications.

We are concerned since many times words repeatedly used begin to represent ideas and we tend to accept it without questioning. It is always the West which has imposed words on us. We need to have a commission to protect us from the terminological terrorism or a conscious war against it by the younger generation.

Most interesting part is they are all companies started in last 2 – 3 years and gained significant reputations in a short span of time by leveraging cloud solutions like http://aws.amazon.com/, http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/ etc.

They presented their story to Shalinder of Sequoia for next level funding (?) and Dr Werner (CTO of Amazon WS). The top 5 that won the award are below.

http://www.techcello.com/

These guys provide a robust framework to develop applications in SaaS framework in .NET technologies. The framework basically takes care of all basic needs to leverage the cloud technologies like Multi-tenancy, data isolation, data scoping, access control, configurability, customizability, performance and scalability are all engineered right in to the Framework. They got Gartner cool vendor award in 2011

http://www.cloudpact.com/

They provide enterprise mobility solutions. They claim to provide a mobile applications development framework on HTML5 which is completely device agnostic. Applications developed using their framework are cross-platform compatible (Blackberry, iOS, Android, Symbian), Offline capabilities, Bar code scanning etc. They offer trial version and it is worth developing some applications using the same

http://www.payoda.com/

A mix of products and services based company providing solutions in multiple verticals and coming up with frameworks / products to handle cloud related issues (Remote administration), seamless application delivery over cloud, intelligent analytics over information transfer on networks etc

http://www.hotelogix.com/

End to end property management solutions with embedded Booking engines, Point of Sale terminals, online payments, pre-integrated with 100s of travel website etc. They have customers from more than 35 countries. Like CRM OnDemand they offer a trial version and if you like it you can convert to a production system

http://www.plivo.com/

They provide cloud based telephony platform at real low cost which they claim as their competitive advantage over other solutions. Suitable to deploy for large institutions and call centers. You can request for an online beta solution

Dr Werner spoke about Amazon cloud services, most of them are something that we are aware in terms of cloud advantages but he presented Cloud as the cost efficient ways of showcasing the talents of young entrepreneurs (pay as peruse than buying your own hardware, software etc)

Mr. Vaidaynathan (Ex VP of CTS) presented about his Social Venture http://www.classle.net/, a social networking site for learning. Primary intention is to help out the poorer sections of the society. Their revenue model is on basis of selling meaningful analytics generated from social interactions to people who are interested.

Also came across a whole lot of interesting applications in Amazon platform leveraging pay per use model of Amazon.

http://animoto.com/ – You upload your photos, it tries to understand the patterns and gives our a beautiful video

https://www.dropbox.com/about, http://www.slideshare.net/ and http://www.smugmug.com/ Hosted platform to share your presentations, videos etc

http://zengatv.com/home.zenga – Online movies

http://kuliza.com/ – Hosted social networking platform for enterprises like Salesforce chatter

http://www.druva.com/ – Hosted backup solutions for enterprise needs

http://www.systap.com/bigdata.htm – High performance hosted platform for data intensive distributed computing

http://www.evernote.com/ – Solutions to remember everything

http://www.via.com/ – Travel portal

http://www.scioinspire.com – Health care solutions provider

http://www.pinelabs.com/nova.html – Loyalty management solutions

So what is your cloud story?

- African proverb, translated in mandarin and posted on the floor of Chinese factory then translated into English and printed in the book The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman.

Where do I want to go? (quick profits or generate a satisfactory cash flow or capital gains)

1. What kind of enterprise should I build to reach there?
2. What risks and sacrifices to such an enterprise demand?
3. Am I ready to take such risks and sacrifices?

How do I get there?

1. Do I have a strategy in place?
2. Is my strategy well defined?
3. Can my strategy generate the desired sufficient profits and growth?
4. Is my strategy sustainable?

Executing the strategy ~ can I do it?

1. Do I have rights resources and relationships in place?
2. How strong is my organization? (structure, infrastructure, norms and values)
3. Can I play my role? (need to evolve from doing, to make others do, prescribing desired results and eventually managing the overall context)

The paper explain the characteristics of an entrepreneur in terms of his thinking and behavior. The significant thinking and behavior by which an entrepreneur differs from a typical manager as explained is below

1. An entrepreneur is driven by Opportunities that are available before him rather than constrained by the resources he currently owns
2. Generally he commits to an opportunity in a revolutionary short duration than evolutionary over a long duration with extensive analysis
3. Commits to the resources in a multistage incremental manner with minimal risk exposure at every stage than single staged extensive commitment of resources upon decision
4. Controls the resources by renting of required resources / expertise rather than trying to own all the resources required
5. Puts in place a flat Management structure with informal networks than a formalized hierarchal nature
6. Compensation policy is value based, team based and unlimited than resource based, on short duration performance and constrained or limited

Knowing the fact that there is a great interest in what is called as intrepreneurship in large organization, this kind of gives you an idea on kind of managers large organization should look out for to develop the entrepreneurial cult in it.

There are many frameworks that Customers use to align their IT strategies and one such is “McFarlan and McKenney Strategic Grid”. Knowing these frameworks will obviously help you to align yourself to your customer’s IT objectives in turn helping your business to grow.

If your customer is not having any such framework in place to decide on their IT strategies, you can counsel him with similar such frameworks. By the way the original intent of this framework is to help companies to evolve their IT strategies , though I am presenting my views here from am IT service provider context. 

As you see below the grid is a simple four quadrant matrix where the IT applications that fall into different quadrants take different importance / priorities to your customers

 Low – Low (Support) 

The first quadrant where the strategic impact of current and future impact of Information systems is “low” is one where the customer’s focus is going to be the least. If you are one the vendors who is providing services in this bucket of applications, you are going to have a trouble to grow the business with the customer. Your options are either to come up with something innovative in this Quadrant of IT application or to penetrate to other quadrants 

High – Low (Factory) 

The bottom left is also a problematic one because your applications may be in lime light as of now but that doesn’t have potential to grow, hence at the best you can look at is some continuous maintenance revenue streams. If you are one the vendors who is providing services in this bucket of applications, to grow your business you have to diversify to top right and bottom right corner

Low – High (Turnaround) 

The top right corner is one where the current IT impact is less but potential future impact of IT is very high. These are the applications which will help your customer to differentiate himself in the market and they can be considered as applications that can turnaround your customer’s prospect. You as an IT service provider should focus on evolving new technologies / solutions in this area if you like to be a part of the future IT initiatives of your customer in this quadrant

 High – High (Strategic)

The bottom right quadrant contains the applications which has highest priority for the customer now as well as in future. If you are into this quadrant you have to ensure your services are top notch as the customer may not compromise in service / product quality, otherwise you would be replaced by someone more competent. Similarly you keep abreast of latest technology / solutions in this space will help to grow your relationship with your customer in future

 Share your thoughts ….