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AccelTree, set up in 2002, is probably one of the youngest companies asked to showcase its innovative creation at the Nasscom annual summit this year. The company created FRED-a mobile framework, which is a rapid application development framework for building and deploying mobile enterprise applications on the simple cell phone.

“AccelTree Software's mission is to help make mobile enterprise solutions ubiquitous,” says Vivek Mannige, CEO, AccelTree. What FRED does is significantly reduce time to build and modify mobile applications, and provides a high performance and low cost operating platform that runs on many server environments, including Linux. “As the mobile-client portion of an application is a 'thin client' with little or no logic residing on the phone, the applications can be easily adapted to new handheld technologies. The mobile applications are focused on being used in India, particularly in rural areas,” adds Mannige.

AccelTree was launched by Mannige and his wife Shanth in Pune. Vivek Mannige, 53, is an alumnus of IIT Kanpur who started his career with Telco in Pune. After spending five years in different departments at Telco, he joined the software division in 1979. As the chief systems analyst, Mannige built Telco's first packaged software product called TurboAnalyst. He left Telco in 1988 after selling its first copy.

Mannige's entrepreneurship began in 1990 when he co-founded Indus Software along with his wife. Two pioneering software tools from the Indus stable were uBridge, a prototyping tool, and Synthesis, a systems analysis and design workbench. The latter was a huge success and sold in 20 countries till 1995. Mannige also transitioned Indus Software from a software products company to a development company, focused on the financial services industry. He took the product LSI to 10 countries.

Mannige stepped down from the Indus Software board four years ago, only to  find AccelTree in Pune. Recalls Mannige, “At my earlier company, we attempted at building and implementing mobile solutions that would be useful in retail banking. However, our attempt at that point of time ran into rough weather because of technological complexities.” The outcome was an unstable application that took too long to build, and even longer to change to meet different user needs. “Moreover, the application was sluggish,” adds Mannige. Clearly, there was a need to separate the technological complexity from the business functionality, which essentially meant the need for a framework. There was none available in the market four years back.

AccelTree Software was founded with the primary motive of building this framework. Shanth Mannige, who had been an active member of the Indus team, followed her husband out of the company to set up AccelTree in March 2002.

Initial investments happened from the husband-wife team, and from three angel investors, one being Dr SS Sundararajan, also an active adviser on the board of the company. Dr Sundararajan was vice president of Selectica in San Jose, and brought to his 30 years of experience in the software industry to AccelTree.

The first three years saw all investments going in to building the framework. Recalls Mannige, “We earned rather insignificant amounts from test sites, but we stuck to our objective to build a strong, reliable framework.” The framework itself was ready for beta testing in February 2004. For a year, the server components of the framework were beta-tested at various locations. The first enterprise mobile solution for banks' field collections of delinquent loans was ready in February 2005.The company got its first customer for a derivate of that product for the microfinance industry in May 2005.

Last year has been quite eventful for Mannige and his team. Since its first customer from the microfinance vertical, AccelTree has acquired a total of four marquee customers. BPL Mobile was one of its key wins. The solution was put in place to create a Mobile Sales system. The system is being used by sales persons for sale of products made directly to retailers.

At a retail outlet, the sales person uses the cell phone to update the entire transaction on-line. He can pick the name of the outlet on the cell phone, and enter the serial numbers of the items being supplied. This then gets displayed on the phone, the invoice value, based on pricing, is done centrally where customer discounts are applied automatically. The sales person also updates details of the payment received. The item serial numbers get updated on the central server directly. Other delivery and invoice details immediately get recorded in the company's receivable system. The sales person can also check the availability and price of items in the warehouse. This reduces order processing time by one day and improves customer satisfaction.

BASIX, a microfinance company, was another key win. The solution allows customer service agents in the field to interact with self-help groups and individual borrowers. While interacting with the borrowers, the agent can access the central system and bring up details of payments that are expected to be received from the borrowers, on the cell phone. Confirmation of receipt of payment is entered in the phone and updated immediately on the server. When a payment is expected but not received, the account status is automatically sent as an alert for further action, to the supervisor's cell phone. At the end of the day, the agent visits a designated bank and deposits the day's collection and records this activity on the cell phone. The payment collection gets automatically reconciled at the server.

Buoyed by key customer wins, Mannige expanded the AccelTree team in 2005. Yogesh Deshpande joined as vice president of business applications from Selectica. Somnath Kalas, a sales veteran of 13 years, joined as assistant vice president to drive growth. Says Mannige, “We have set a target of Rs10 crore for 2006-07.” In 2007-08, he hopes to double this target as things move at the same pace. Great going, is all we can say.

Bhaswati Chakravorty
bhaswatic@cybermedia.co.in

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