Amid the hundreds of companies that bloomed during the IT boom in India in the nineties, Bangalore-based Spatial Data Private (Spinfo) had a quiet birth with no fanfare. Spinfo focuses on a niche area of IT: geographical information systems (GIS). Sanathanagopalan Rajagopalan, managing director of Spinfo, appears more an academic than a businessman with a relaxed, open and professorial manner and an approach to business that even appears "non-commercial".
This is corroborated by Dr Vaidya Srikandappa Rajamma, who is in charge of the World Bank-funded project that is putting together a database for the health system in the Indian state of Karnataka. "We chose Spinfo after getting quotations from three other Indian GIS companies for developing GIS software and digitalised maps for 23 districts in Karnataka," Rajamma says. Spinfo's was the most reasonable - about one-sixth the quote of the market leader." She found the company "dedicated and not at all commercially minded".
Nevertheless, Spinfo, with 30 employees, expects sales of Rs2.5 million (US$51,750) for the year ended March 2002 and is targeting sales of Rs10 million by 2003.
Part of the company's success can be attributed to the fact that it is able to quote a much lower price than its competitors because it has developed in-house GIS software, while the others use imported software.
Spinfo was set up in May 1999 by Rajagopalan (pictured), Sathish Selvakumar (the COO) and two others with Rs2 million collected from friends and relatives. Later on, some angel investors and two venture capital funds invested an additional Rs8 million.
Rajagopalan, 46, is a chemical engineer and MBA with 20 years' experience in managing technology projects.
"We started this company because we found that there were two major problems blocking the spread of GIS technology in India," he says. "One was that the software was expensive (it costs about US$1,700 per licence). The other was that digitalised maps were not available for India. We thought that if we could spend money upfront and develop digitalised maps and bundle them with GIS software and offer them as a product in a ready-to-use and reasonably priced CD, there would be a good market for it." With such a product, the customer would not have to invest in expensive GIS software to use the map data. For digitalising maps, Spinfo starts with a paper map (which is mostly outdated) and then uses satellite image data as well as ground surveys to update it.
To date, Spinfo has released six digitalised map products: India as a whole, three Indian states (Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu) and two cities (Bangalore and Chennai). The state maps showing village boundaries and roads have socio-economic and census data integrated with them. Spinfo's proprietary software allows the user to annotate maps, add data, undertake statistical analysis and print the maps.
Spinfo spends about Rs1.7 million to develop a digitalised map for a state and sells them for Rs25,000 per CD (non-profit organisations get a discount of 33%). A city product costs about Rs2 million to develop and is available for Rs495 on a CD. "We are able to price our products so low only because the software has been developed by us," says Rajagopalan. " If we were to use imported software, the royalty payment itself per CD would be about Rs3,000. We don't make money on the city products. In fact, the palm top versions of the city maps can be downloaded free from our website. Our approach is to show the potential of a digital map in various applications and then try to get city level government bodies to start using these maps with tools. For example, it is possible to collect tax street by street."
Spinfo does not use mass marketing because it is too expensive. Though its city digital maps are being sold through retail outlets and e-tailers such as Fabmart, the company personally visits each potential customer. It's a painful process as only one out of 20 people visited buys the product. "But," says Rajagopalan, "the heartening thing is that the people who use it recommend it to others."
Selvakumar says Spinfo, in partnership with another software company, is working on tracking vehicles using SMS messages on mobile phones. The company is also developing map-based management of plantations and electricity distribution, weather forecasting and interpretation of crop health based on satellite images. It also plans to sell its GIS software as a product so that someone wanting to make digitalised maps of a particular city can do so by adding the map data and following the manual. Spinfo also customises other GIS software packages such as MapInfo and ArcView.
Spatial Data Private
747, Sri Krishna Temple Road
Indiranagar 1st Stage
Bangalore 560038, India
Tel: 91-80-5254306, 5253708
Fax: 91-80-5213125
Email: raj@spinfosoft.com
www.spinfosoft.com