Ashwin Kandoi, says....‘A happy customer is your biggest investor’
Published on : Monday 30-11--0001
What started as an internship project in 2004 has bloomed into a full-fledged solutions provider today. What was the vision then, and motivation?
We wanted to create an organisation which will create Wealth and Value for all stake holders involved. The motivation was to create an organisation which lives after the co-founders for years to come.
Tell us something about the initial days and early successes and failures, the lessons?
We got our first customer from UK and we ensured we put our heart and soul into it, and as you know, a happy customer is your biggest investor, they referred us to new customers and we expanded in the UK.
IoTSense and PredictSense are the two main products of Winjit. What are the highlights of these two products and the main areas of applications?
These are our two main products for Digital Transformation in the manufacturing sector. We have other products as well.
IoTSense is an advanced full-scale IoT Platform that enables connecting modern as well Legacy Protocol sensors, on the edge and cloud, securely, providing real-time analytics, rule-based actions and M2M communication, to make it more comprehensive. PredictSense, is an automated machine learning platform built on an open API structure using efficient algorithms. It helps solve complex real-time business problems with its high-power algorithms in a very less amount of operational time.
Both these products are explained at length on their respective websites, www.iotsense.io and www.predictsense.io with the relevant information.
Winjit launched the Industrial IoT version of IoTSense recently at Automation Expo. How was the initial response?
The response was good. We had a good footfall and meaningful enquiries. (See box)
IoT and its industry avatar IIoT is said to have the potential to transform every aspect of business and manufacturing respectively. But what is the level of awareness and the readiness for adoption?
We saw increased level of awareness. The stakeholders are mentally prepared to take the leap. There is just a bit of hesitation on the implementation aspect.
What is the experience of working with MSMEs in industrial domain? Are Winjit products ideally suited to this segment?
We have been associated with the manufacturing sector and have been working closely with auto ancillary sector for various requirements. This puts us in a unique position of being experts on how a SME works. Winjit’s WIP monitoring system has been engineered with consideration for the SME sector. The data acquisition is to be done without human intervention and intuitive dashboards and reports that can easily be understood by the plant resources.
Ideally, for a typical user, legacy equipment is a big consideration as to how to start the digital transformation. Are there solutions for this?
Winjit’s WIP monitoring system is built around our path breaking IoTSense platform. This is a full stack platform includes connectivity layer that supports most industrial protocols including legacy protocols such as Modbus (ASCII/RTU), CanOpen, OPC UA in addition to the modern wired and wireless protocols such as TCP/IP, MQTT, LORA, ZigBee, LPWAN, NBIOT, etc. Our team is constantly working to incorporating any new protocol that is asked by the customers.
Finally, having gone through the learning curve, what would be your advice to the many youngsters now entering this arena?
Focus on acquiring customers – paid customers – rather than focus your energy on investments. A paying and happy customer is the biggest investor you can acquire. Don't be afraid to ask for help from peers and seniors – many people are around to help.
One has to learn the intricate operations that happen in an industry. Or for that matter any application one builds. One has to explore the functional details/intricacies and then look at how digital intervention can assist/improve the process. One of the things that has helped us while Product Engineering is that we spend a lot of time on the field living and breathing in the same space for whom we were building the application, and that was a great learning experience.