Compassites: Reverberating Tech needs with a 'WOW' Experience

<<This artcile was published in Silicon India business magazine in April 2013>>

With the acceleration of changes in business methodologies, many organizations are struggling to implement technology solutions that reverberate anticipated needs owing to usage of proprietary technologies and the vendors’ development roadmap being out of sync with business requirements. Concurrently, many software projects are stupefied owing to excessive analysis and documentation of needs and options or an extravagant policy towards perfection. 

Mahesh Baxi, the CEO of Compassites software realized a dire need for pure domain agnostic players with out of the box, yet simplistic thinking capabilities as opposed to traditional and orthodox business methodologies. 

Compassites, headquartered in Bangalore, with delivery centers in the U.S, Australia, Bangalore and Pune is the latest company with avant-garde solutions and services in Cloud, Big Data Analytics and IT consumerization. Since laying its foundation in 2005, the company has been providing unique preferences to work with open source and open standard technologies, owing to amenability to being configured to specific needs, as well as unmatched skill sets to absorb new elements and create additional capabilities.

Co-founded by Naveen Lakkur, Director and V V Ranganathan, Chairman, the company wholly adherers to Voltaire’s, a French historian and philosopher’s aphorism "perfect is the enemy of good". All throughout its existence, Compassites has had a very pragmatic approach to running projects. Throughout its sound research capabilities and timely deliverables, how does the company stand out from its competitors? The secret lies with its unique time to market strategy and a strong bias for action owing to its software developers' agile pedigree.

Under its CEO, Mahesh Baxi, the company has worked with several customers around the globe to help build custom software solutions. The success can be attributed to non-alignment to certain verticals. i.e. by being truly a business domain agnostic, highly specialized technology company. The agnostic view can be explained in the way the company views big analytics. While the normal IT service provider views big analytics as a serious and impending threat, Baxi views the situation as a challenge presenting unprecedented opportunities. The employees of the firm strongly believe that the data generated by complex systems possesses tons of knowledge, and can be leveraged correctly, eventually leading to business opportunities, reduction in costs and higher positive impact for organizations. This has been the cogitative approach that has led to the company producing more than 24 products and delivering successfully to clients in Australia, US, Middle-East, South America, India and Singapore to name a few.

Contradistinctive Approach

There is a primary focus on solving business critical problems for customers using technology as the core expertise with an elementary cynosure on custom software solutions. Despite technology manifesting into the heart of the company, Compassites always take a holistic approach to solving business critical problems for its customers. The best example of this can be of how Compassites helped Authentix, a global leader in authentication and nano tracking solutions for excise tax recovery and brand protection, curbing the tobacco smuggling menace with the aid of the firm’s in-genuine technology solutions.

The American states were bogged down due to tobacco smuggling and illegal authentication methodologies. Washington loses nearly $200 million a year due to Tobacco tax frauds. To come up with a solution, Authentix partnered with Compassites to create a state of the art authentication stamp. With the technology, Compassites was able to provide multiple layers of security with each stamp including multiple layers of overt, covert and forensic security features.

The method was simple; the stamps were made unusable until the encrypted code is applied via a digital printer by the stamp application at the wholesaler's site to avoid counterfeiting occurrences.

The solution was such a success that Authentix was able to significantly bring down the inter-state fraud level and also lead to an impressive 40 percent improvement in operational efficiency. Compassites has been delivering such high class, yet simple and in-genuine products to a host of famous companies such as Graymatics & Zyme in Big Data, iCharts & Seedling in Cloud enablement, Payback & Jiffle in IT consumerization and Authentix & Hydratech in technology consulting to name a few. The core businesses of the clients have varied from retail, finances, healthcare, technology and intelligent information subscriptions to extremely secure brand protection & product authentication solutions.

The Sui Generis Methodology

The way a business critical project is solved by the company is a tried and trusted procedure which solely lies in understanding the customer’s business context and the nature of the problem unlike predefined solutions that are non-compatible with a host of clients. On comprehending the context of the problem in question, the experts work with the customer to define a bold vision of a success story. This is what Compassites terms as the 'vision splendid' - in which the client has used technology to transform the business to compete more effectively and profitably. In the case of Authentix, the accomplished "vision splendid" was to bring tax stamps into the digital era by eliminating the need for expensive and vulnerable inventories of printed stamps while providing real-time auditing and immediate cash retrieval.

Through such out of the box thinking, the clientele receive the benefit of years of collective skills and experience, without the need to deal with multiple vendors interested more in pushing a product or selling a license than creating true business values. 

The mission and focus for combining all of the positive factors and the want to grow exponentially is not fueled by the pressure for quarterly results or distributing profits to shareholders, but by the strong desire to execute the foremost mission: "To create a WOW experience for all the stakeholders through innovative technology solutions and delivery excellence." For iCharts, a cloud-based company enabling processing, visualization and distribution of big and small data, Compassites provided a solution, which combined the relevance of big data with the flexibility offered by the cloud. iCharts, with the help of Compassites Navigators was able to significantly increase processing capacity through Amazon RDS and reduce the infrastructure costs by half. 'Navigators' is what the employees within Compassites are passionately referred to for all the expertise and hard work they bring to the table.

Incorporating the Best Business Strategies

"A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all" ~ Michael LeBoeuf
At Compassites, the customers are viewed as the contrivance of the start and end point. It is a well-known fact that it is difficult for even the most technologically sophisticated organizations to fully articulate requirements for a software project. This in turn creates considerable anxiety and uncertainties owing to firms delaying in committing to a final set of requirements before the project commences.
The leadership realized this and took an approach to software projects that were designed on the assumption that requirements have change as the only constant factor. To create the maximum flexibility for change, the software was painstakingly developed in an intermittent fashion. Adding to this, a dual engagement style in the form of working with both offshore and onshore projects, including a hybrid model provides ample advantages over focusing on traditional models.

"True partnership facilitates growth and competitive advantage for both parties, as it enables a focus on new areas of shared opportunity. In our experience it usually leads to innovative and creative solutions, improved processes, shared savings and increased business value." says Mahesh Baxi, CEO of Compassites. 

The Solutions and Services Arsenal

What the Navigators within Compassites do uniquely instead of spending months creating hefty design and business requirements and artifacts is, translating business and customer insights and customer-tested designs into working software prototypes that the customers can experience firsthand.

As part of custom solutions and technology focus, Compassites provides neo consulting with respect to .Net, Java, RoR, LAMP, PHP and HTML5 to name a few. In the field of IT consumerization, the firm provides strategy consulting and application development, e-Commerce enablement and Mobile application development platforms. Alfresco, LifeRay and Sharepoint are some of the famous content management platforms deployed by Compassites.

In the field of big data analytics, customers swear by Compassites proactive envision plumbing in structure and unstructured data for actionable reports / charts. The firm specializes in Hadoop, MongoDB, DynamoDB, Custom MapReduce algorithms and also in analytics tools such as Pentaho, Palo and Mondrian.

"The company’s iterative ‘test and learn’ approach to solution validation and prototyping allows clients to evaluate options and competing hypotheses using concrete examples as opposed to orthodox theoretical thinking. Expert collaboration with software experts helps to understand even mini technical constraints and to ensure all potential solutions are well grounded in terms of feasibility, timeframe and budget," says Baxi.

Forever Creating a "wow" Experience

Moving forward, the foremost goal for Compassites is to grow exponentially in the coming years. With customers in the US, Australia, Latin America, Middle-East, Singapore and India, Compassites passionately strives towards a revenue stream that is balanced between developed economies and developing economies. Both these economies have different business problems, level of innovation and creativity that is required to address the markets. Compassites specializes in solving business critical problems considering all the factors that come along with a dual shore model.

In the constant zeal to create a wow experience and delight clients, Compassites looks forward to growth across the globe through physical presence in terms of offices and hiring capable individuals.

"Our search for a potential Navigator does not end till the time we find passionate, culturally aligned and ownership driven individuals. In short, we are on a constant look out for thought leaders at all levels as we strongly believe that we should ‘catch them young’ and give the best-groomed leaders back to society" says Manav Prasad, head of HR at Compassites.

While technology is core to the heart, the company today remains focused on solving business critical problems from start-ups to enterprise companies. Hence with the most unique in its class technology adoption levels, complexity of problems and frugality levels around innovation, Compassites promises to turn into the one stop industrial solutions provider in the near future for all things technology.

The Man behind the Agnostic Approach

An avid blogger and technology enthusiast with over 19 years of global IT services experience, Mahesh Baxi has been exceptional in motivating the leaders of tomorrow through his blog www.mahesbaxi.com . He has held many pivotal leadership roles with stints in a host of companies such as Apttus, Vendavo, Nextance and Challenger Systems for close to twelve years in the San Francisco Bay area. His previous role was the Managing Director of ThoughtWorks India.

A B.E. degree holder in Computer Engineering from Gujarat University, he derives his leadership skills from his many business travels across the world. During the course of this story, he had already visited clients in the US and settled new deals in Singapore. 

However, being the progressive thinker he is, Mahesh is not 'all work and no play'. He is an avid cyclist, loves to experiment in cooking and indulges as an amateur singer in his free time. A believer in accomplishing missions over sticking to a vague idea of a vision, Mahesh drew from his many experiences of working with various international clients to come up with leadership mantras that he talks about in his absorbing book "New Age Leadership: Practical mantras on leadership". The book is a culmination of Mahesh's extensive experience and has churned out a host of anecdotes on leadership. The book also features a host of funny, yet thought provoking cartoons to sustain and enthrall readers. Today he continues to inspire future leaders through his thoughts while steering Compassites and its Navigators towards success.