An Exclusive Interview with Saravana Kumar, Founder and CEO, Kovai.co

One of the major disruptive technologies known as cloud computing is thriving in the Indian tech market in recent years. SaaS or Software-as-a-Service is the core model of cloud computing that hosts an application on its own servers through a seamless internet connection. India has started reaping the benefits of the SaaS industry for efficient business functions across the world. The global SaaS market is projected to hit US$272.49 billion in 2021 with a CAGR of 20.8%.

Here is an exclusive interview with Saravana Kumar, Founder and CEO, Kovai.co, who has identified the opportunities of the SaaS industry in the Indian domestic market and has described how Kovai.co is focused on growing local technology hubs in the next few years.

1. Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services that it offers.

Kovai.co is a multi-product enterprise SaaS company specializing in enterprise integration and knowledge management space based out of Coimbatore, India, and London, UK. Over the years, it has grown organically to five products with more than 200 team members is currently serving over 1500 customers across the world. Creating flagship enterprise SaaS products, combining technology expertise with domain experience is the forte. Additionally, Kovai.co built a successful global product technology company out of the home city— Coimbatore— the team's unique competence.

Products including BizTalk360, Serverless360, and Cerebrata help businesses to manage their Microsoft Azure and serverless environment better. Document360 is the knowledge base platform known as an advanced portal that provides companies all the advanced features to build the self-service knowledge base for private and public use.

2. Tell us how Kovai.co is contributing to the SaaS industry of the nation and how the company is benefiting its clients.

As a technology community-oriented company, Kovai.co conducts various technical activities to sharpen people's skills, especially in enterprise software and SaaS. Over the last few years, it has extended insights to colleges and universities across Tamil Nadu through Kovai.co Connect program, an industry-academia initiative. The program's core focus is to reach out to engineering students who are aspiring to enter the SaaS industry from tier-2 cities— making them industry-ready by providing more acumen on how product development and SaaS innovation happen at the ground level.

The team is steadily identifying and building the next-gen talent in such growing markets. What the SaaS or the tech industry in the country today needs is the nurturement of local talent, so they get the right opportunity at the right time. It will reduce the talent shifting to established markets like Bangalore, Chennai, Mumbai, etc., and grow local technology hubs in other parts of the nation for even socio-economic growth.

Speaking about client benefits, some of the Kovai.co's products are addressing the gaps when working or managing the Microsoft Azure or serverless environments. And the most recent product, Document360, helps companies create an online self-service knowledge base for their customers and employees.

3. Please brief us about the products/services/solutions you provide to your customers and how they get value out of it.

• BizTalk360 is for Microsoft BizTalk server analytics, administration, and management. It helps administrators to work more efficiently with the BizTalk server and be in control of its environment. Over 650 customers globally are using BizTalk360 on top of their BizTalk environment. Some of the key aspects are it makes the testing cycle more efficient, sends alerts when there is a problem, and helps to track different processes within business applications.
• Serverless360 is a support platform engineered for Microsoft Azure resources. Serverless360 brings the best-in-class features and solutions from a business perspective to empower a Microsoft Azure support team. From business applications, activity monitoring to Azure documenter, Serverless360 provides supporting capabilities to all of Microsoft Azure Services including Logic Apps, Event Grid, Service Bus, Azure SQL, API apps, etc.
• Document360 helps companies to instantly create an online self-service knowledge base for both customers and employees that can be accessed either publicly or privately. Key features include technical documentation, online user guides, FAQs creation, internal knowledge base, and building SOPs that can be used as employee handbooks or a sales or marketing playbook.

4. How do you plan to revolutionize the Indian market and what are your plans to tap the market?

The team works in the context of building great software products to solve daily business problems. This is a passionate group of people crafting best-in-class global B2B and SaaS products from a city like Coimbatore. The aim is to transform Coimbatore into the next big SaaS hub in the country by growing local talent.

In India, more businesses have now realized the importance of subscribing to SaaS products to scale growth rather than build from scratch and end up spending huge money, time, and energy. Though the adoption of SaaS is lower compared to Europe, America, and other advanced countries, the company can see an upswing— thus the aim is to build more awareness on this and have SaaS play a major role in their digital and business growth.

 5. How does your company's strategy facilitate the transformation of an enterprise?

The strategy is to fuel and showcase what enterprises can achieve when day-to-day operations are better monitored, simplified, and understood. The team facilitates their transformation when time-consuming troubleshooting of processes is reduced, provides more visibility without interruption, as well as a knowledge base to record and create content that will help to understand complex processes better.

6. Mention some of the awards, achievements, recognitions, and clients' feedback that you feel are notable and valuable for the company.

Over the last ten years, several teammates (including Saravana) have been recognized by Microsoft as "Microsoft's Most Valuable Professional" — this pushes the team to a higher level of value within the tech community. He has been recognized as an MVP for 15 years in a row. Last year, Kovai.co was awarded the "Bootstrapped SaaS Startup of the Year" by SaaSBoomi. The same year the company reached US$10 million in annual recurring revenue and acquired more than 1500 customers globally.