Introduction

Question: Where are the successful product startups from India? How to become one? And how long will we be taking example of only one company (Zoho)?

To answer this question, we’ll be attending NASSCOM Product Conclave 2009 on Oct 27-28 at the Lalit Ashok hotel, Bangalore.
It’s a traditional conference organized by NASSCOM (short for “National Association of Software and Services Companies”), the consortium that represents software companies in India.
The agenda this year is “Positioning to Win.”

Why is it interesting?

As the official website says:

Come, demonstrate your product, network, share with peers, and learn how to identify market opportunities, build a product organization with domain expertise, roll out a product, build brands, reach out to prospects and customers, create a network effect of channels, user and development communities – in short how to build a viable and scalable business model.

Of course, the caveat is always that no amount of teaching or sessions will help anyone until, you, the audience takes it seriously, imagine putting it into action immediately and ask questions on what will come up in your course of action. In short, look for the advice that you need.

Now that we have that diatribe out of the way, let us focus on the conference. There will be 4 keynotes, 11 panel sessions, 4 workshops, networking sessions and unconference sessions. The full program agenda is available as a PDF. The truly interesting part of this event is the quality of people expected to be on stage.

Here are the parts of the agenda that we found interesting:

1. Key Sessions and Panel discussions:

• Technology Opportunities serving the millions of India: The next major growth area for Indian technology firms
• Building a product ecosystem that addresses the millions of India
• Building global consumer businesses out of India
• Leverage the ecosystem for Product Development
• Indians Pulling off the impossible
• Product strategies in the telecom sector: potential for global leadership
• Why and how you can tie-up with SIs if you have a software product for enterprises
• Listen to key speakers from the usual suspects such as Guy Kawasaki, Kiran Karnik, Ashish Gupta, Rajesh Jain, VCs to people you would not usually get to hear from such as Ajay Dhir (CIO, Jindal Steel), Rajesh Hukku (SVP, Oracle), and founders of successful startups such as from iYogi, Stylkist, BabaJobs, and so on.

2. Workshops such as the Workshop on Go-To-Market strategies for Product companies which is being led by Subinder Khurana, Delivery Head, Enterprise Analytics, Cognizant.

3. Unconference sessions

• Krishnas and Arjunas — regarding advisors and mentors
• Hiring in startups, plus startups and potential employees get to talk to each other
• One on one business mentoring sessions
• Impact of social media inside organizations

4. Product Expo showcasing 12 companies with products for the enterprise market.

5. Specific structured networking sessions for startups with CIOs, country delegations, potential partners, potential advisors, potential employees, potential investors.

The downside is that because there are three separate parallel tracks, we won’t be able to cover all of them. We hope that we can cover the whole spectrum along with other indian startup blogs.

We wonder if we can hope for talks such as the one by Prof. Deepak Malhotra (Harvard Business School) about how to negotiate at NASSCOM Leadersip Forum 2007.

How to follow this event?

If you’re unable to attend the event in-person, then don’t fret because there are multiple ways to follow this event:

• We will be covering the event and hope to bring you new insights and interesting learnings as much as possible.
• Participate in the NASSCOM communities discussions
• Follow the NASSCOM blog
• Follow the #nasscompc tag on Twitter and @nasscom_pc
• Watch out for NASSCOM videos

This guest post is written by Swaroop C H, co-founder of a startup called IonLab. He writes regularly on his blog at www.swaroopch.com, considered to be one of the top ten blogs in India along with StartupDunia.