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India, the graveyard of innovative pilots, the place where most product companies don't survive beyond their first birthday, is now seeing a lot of corrections in its business models, investment patterns, focus areas and perhaps, more importantly, the ecosystem. Home-bred product companies are talking about investing in the distribution system, fuelling demand by making software affordable and available. Microsoft is doing its bit by providing innovative companies valuable resources-from exposure to the V-C community to its technology; and, at times, even marketing help. Recently, it got a bouquet of companies to pitch in for 20-25 minutes before Dan'L Lewin, corporate vice president, DPE Division, a mouthpiece to the reset of the V-C community in the Silicon Valley and someone who holds an annual event called the 'VC summit'. India found a window when chairman Ravi Venkatesan went over to pitch India last year, talking about a number of companies who were sort of representatives from the country. Dataquest catches up with Dan'L and Microsoft India director, Sheila Gulati to find out more.

Sheila Gulati                      Dan'L Lewin

To innovative companies who want to work on the Windows platform, what do you have to offer? Will you invest in them?
Dan'L Lewin: We are not a venture capital firm and most corporations do not do direct investment. But we provide all kinds of other resources to the young, innovative as well as the ISVs. We invest heavily into our partner programs. By anyone's estimate, our developer programs and our reach-our DPE division alone, which is a global division, has 1,500 people and very significant tens and tens of millions of dollars' operating budget that we put forth to enable and work with partners-all intended at helping them succeed with customers. Resources would mean marketing, technical resources, training, their selling efforts in channel, significant architectural guidance, access to different platform technologies.

How many Indian companies have you reached out to?
Sheila Gulati: In terms of our partner database, there are quite a few companies we reach out to through our ISV activities. We invite thousands of people four times a year to speak about different technologies, business trends and there is a series of technical labs that come out of that. That is quite a large database in terms of companies and individuals. 

What is the order of magnitude globally?
Dan'L Lewin: At any given year, we will take a look at a couple of thousand companies that received venture financing. That's the macro level. There are about a 100 companies a month that have relevance to our industry and some meaning for us helping them. It narrows down to about 200 plus per year that we can, with high integrity, say we help.

What is the rationale behind the 'India is Innovation' campaign?
Sheila Gulati: We are creating a set of marketing materials. This is something Dan'L's team did globally. They called it 'Innovation Starts Here', which was a profiling of innovative companies. Ours is called 'India is Innovation' and so is a profiling of innovative companies coming out of India. We are going to re-brand India and be the front-end of marketing for these companies, be it in Silicon Valley or to the community here. It is the first time we are doing this in such a structured manner. We pitched our partner ecosystem to venture capitalists in India.

Is Microsoft looking at buying innovative companies discovered through its emerging business team?
Dan'L Lewin: Sometimes we pay a fair price and buy them. We are a good acquirer. In the 90s, we brought more companies than any other large tech company. In this decade also, we are leading in terms of the number of companies we acquired. But our primary concern and motivation in a world of service orientation and Web services is that there is more partnering opportunity than ever because we are going out to the edge of the network and there is a new market, business opportunity, customer demands. We are a platform company at the core-our servers, databases, tools, even Office now is a very effective, programmable asset; Excel is now very powerful in the Office system-things that can be embedded in other solutions. So we have many more empowering platform assets available today than we did five years ago and with Web services and XML related standards in interoperability, our component pieces and parts can be leveraged by partners. We spend a lot of time with entrepreneurs.

Goutam Das
goutamd@cybermedia.co.in

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