Vinay Nathan, CEO, Altizon
In our first interview with Ajit Patil, we received strong feedback and encouragement from the community to tread on this path. In our next conversation, we have interviewed Mr. Vinay Nathan. Vinay is the CEO and Co-Founder of Altizon Inc., a leading platform provider in the Industrial Internet of Things space.
With over 23 years of varied experience across sales, marketing, engineering, and product management, his work and travels have helped him gain a deep understanding of businesses and markets across North America, India and APAC.
Vinay holds multiple patents and has a keen interest in advancing entrepreneurship globally. He frequently speaks on Industry 4.0, Entrepreneurship, and Technology.
Altizon is one of the most reputed startups in the IoT space. It has raised over USD 12m with investors including TVS Motors, The Hive, and Lumis Partners.
Below is the interview with Vinay:
1. Please provide a brief overview of the company and its product offerings?
Vinay: Altizon, an industrial IoT company, empowers Industrial Digital Revolutions globally by helping enterprises use machine data to drive business decisions. We enable digital transformation in enterprises by accelerating Smart Manufacturing initiatives, modernizing Asset Performance Management, and pioneering new Business Models for service delivery.
For e.g. our Smart Manufacturing Application Suite called MINT provides out-of-the-box support for Productivity. Quality, Maintenance, Energy, and Traceability/Genealogy. This helps a wide array of users in the manufacturing plants and corporates keep track of important KPIs both in real-time and with advanced big data analytics. It helps a connected plant be up and running in a matter of weeks to adopt Industrial IoT.
2. What is your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) / target customer? Please also add some flavor to the geography of these customers and the size of the customers (MSME, mid-sized or large enterprises).
Vinay: We work with manufacturing companies looking to implement Industrial IoT and Industry 4.0 to make their manufacturing operations smarter. Our customers are spread across verticals such as Automotive, CPG, Chemicals, Industrials and F&B. The manufacturing clusters in India, USA, Germany, Thailand, and Japan are of particular interest. Our products are deployed across the entire value chain from SMEs to large Fortune 500 companies.
3. Does your product require any integration efforts or customization, while deploying solutions at customers end?
Vinay: Yes, System Integrators (SIs) have ample opportunity to provide services around getting machines connected, integrating data silos, building custom applications and enterprise software integrations to build holistic solutions.
Being a new age platform that is focused on fast deployments, the initial system integration work to get a plant connected might take a couple of weeks for a small plant and a couple of months for a mega-scale plant. The upside for the SI lies in using the base functionality provided out of the box to assess custom application development and extensions that are needed by the customer to enhance the value from the system. That can be a perpetual recurring service revenue stream for the SI.
4. How are you currently generating leads for your organization (inbound vs. outbound)? What strategy is working best for you?
Vinay: We primarily focus targeted accounts for our outbound lead generation activities and content marketing for generating inbound leads. This has been the best fit for our business development activities. 70% of our business is driven by outbound lead gen activities.
5. Do you think your lead generation strategy would evolve as your organization grows?
Vinay: Yes. Once we achieve a certain level of scale, the outbound activities will need to include more marketing outreach.
6. Do you work with channel partners to acquire customers? Could you profile such channel partners?
Vinay: We work with SIs across the world to help us increase our access to customers. These include large global SIs and smaller automation providers in factories. For e.g. you can go through the published press release of our work at HIL with Deloitte.
7. How do you go about looking for such channel partners?
Vinay: We currently rely more on inbound traffic with thought leadership content published through our blogs and webinars.
8. What kind of engagement models have you evaluated to work with Channel partners? What has worked best in your context?
Vinay: We have worked in both the models, one where Altizon generates leads and involves SI partners for fulfillment of services, and, as a product fulfillment partner for an opportunity sourced by an SI. For both these models, Altizon provides resellers a portion of the recurring SaaS revenue. We are also comfortable with providing a transfer price to SI partners to help them better frontend customer engagement.
9. Do you have a dedicated person to explore channel partnership? If not, do you plan to bring someone on board?
Vinay: Our entire Sales team manages channel partnerships. They have incentivization that is independent of that offered to the SIs. That is why there is no conflict with any SI’s ability to engage with them and vice versa.
10. What is your current revenue mix between direct customers vs. through channel partners? How is this expected to evolve over a period of time?
Vinay: Currently given our scale, about 70% of our business is directly sourced by us. Over the next couple of years, we do anticipate this to flip.
Hope you have enjoyed the interview. It’s important that early-stage founders learn from the experience of founders who have crossed a certain phase. So, please do give us feedback on whether we are able to support you on that journey. If you want certain aspects to be covered in such an interview, then let us know as well.