With the constantly evolving technologies and demand for improving businesses with technology, reality keeps changing, pushing the boundaries of the future by transforming the present. As a modernistic civilization, we have achieved tremendous progress by innovating our thinking and advancing our technologies, thus creating an ability to adopt technologies at a very high pace to improve the future. On the edge of today and tomorrow is the ship of ZiniosEdge Software Technologies, which is poised to make further great strides in the future.
Regaling the inception saga of this extended reality, ZiniosEdge’s Co-founders – Prasad (COO) and Niranjan (CEO), share the details of the wonderful journey they have had thus far, and their plans for the upcoming future.
Ingenious Journey of Zestful Souls
Zinios Information Technologies started its ingenious journey in 2016 with a pack of zestful souls. With a strong DNA for design thinking and innovation in AR, VR, MR, UI, UX, IoT, eCommerce, Zinios was excelling in designing, developing and delivering user-centric hyper-innovative products with outstanding customer experience.
Today, ZiniosEdge Software Technologies inherits decades of value-driven experience from its leadership and extended teams that continuously deliver exceptional consulting, designing, developing, and deploying digital solutions and services.
Prasad says, “It has been an amazing seven-year journey at ZiniosEdge.” The inception of the company was in May 2016, and the vision was to create a unique software services company which was domain agnostic and become a tech-focused (specifically on bleeding edge technologies and concepts) company that would allow for attracting the best talent from the market. “Irrespective of their size, we ensure the best service is provided to our customers,” adds Niranjan.
Creating Great Teams
Sharing their inspiration behind venturing into the business arena, they say that both of the founders, from varied backgrounds, came with a passion for creating a unique services company with a focus on ESAT and CSAT. With multi-decade experience in leading large teams and providing the best-outsourced services capabilities for their customers, they believed they would be successful in creating a company that made a difference. Customers had constantly given them feedback that they had built and led great teams; this was one of the biggest motivators for them. Having been able to do that under the umbrella of large services companies and having scaled teams with high customer and employee satisfaction, they felt they needed to create an opportunity for themselves to do this independently.
Recollecting the initial challenges they had to surmount to ensure ZiniosEdge’s success rate reached greater heights, they say one of the exciting challenges for them was attracting the best possible talent. Prasad says, “When we started, we had the privilege of our earlier teams coming along with us on the journey, trusting us and banking on us to create opportunities for their careers to grow.”
The Brand Power of Transparency and Ownership
This initial step gave them a great foundation to bring in more talent. While the initial days ran on their personal brand power, over a year or two, they were able to showcase a conducive, inclusive and exciting workplace for people to work in. To ensure retention, much work had to be done on internal branding; since more was needed to attract new talent, they needed to ensure high retention. Niranjan adds, “We are very proud that our attrition rates were meager in the first few years as we focused on building a stable org and then scale aggressively.”
It helped them create the best platform possible for new joiners, who received great tech mentors for their career growth. It also showed its customers that they were a stable organization with long-term employees who grew along with the company. Newer clients, newer projects, and newer technologies gave their employees excellent opportunities to learn and grow along with them. They also ensured that while ZiniosEdge scaled, they scaled with control. They were clear that they would get to their first 100 employees at a controlled pace, with high satisfaction for employees and customers.
About professional values and qualities that they believe their clients value in them and ZiniosEdge the most, they say their customers appreciate their transparency and ownership the most; It is humbling for them that this is a common theme they see whenever they ask customers for testimonials and feedback. The overwhelming mention of these two traits makes them believe that they have kept these values intact and continue to do so with all their customers.
Customers also believe that the sense of learning, want for new challenges, and the team’s go-get-it-done attitude helped them achieve their goals. As you can imagine, customer priorities and goals (startups to enterprises) can differ, and aligning to the focus areas is critical. “This is another value customers have appreciated a lot, that the teams we have built and put in place align quickly to the customer’s vision, align to the path set and strive towards making it better, the ownership the teams show in ensuring customer’s customers are happy is constantly appreciated; clients call out that the team’s go the extra mile to ensure accountability.” says Prasad.
Focused Future
Sharing USPs highlighting brand ZiniosEdge’s uniqueness in the industry they are catering to, Niranjan says, “As we entered our third year of operations, we began to realize that though our customers were happy with us and employees were thrilled to work at ZiniosEdge, here was a need to be DIFFERENT”; now, what was that supposed to be – focus on a domain? Focus on a product/platform? Align themselves to a specific theme? etc. They stumbled upon the area of XR (Augmented, Virtual and Mixed Reality); they saw that this adoption in the Indian market was low, the hardware needed was very expensive, the available talent was very low, but most importantly, the potential opportunities were huge. Whomever they saw/bumped into had built product companies with a focus in these areas, not many who, at that time, had services companies with a main focus (or one of the focuses) in this area.
They picked it up right away, started to prep around this with a few employees and also were able to convince a few customers to outsource services, projects, and product building to them. “We were lucky that the first few customers who gave us this opportunity trusted us and helped us along the journey,” says Niranjan. He further adds, “We then forayed into AI/ML, but since there were many organisations already there, we created unique set of offerings with the combination of AI + AR and focused on winning and executing projects that had both AI/ML and AR as the main product capabilities.”
In parallel, building team’s that appreciated these technologies, adapted quickly to them and ensured they were updated with the concepts, made for better teams and thus better services to customers. The leadership team’s stepped up to understand this new world, what it takes to deliver in these arenas and ensured their own and their team’s preparedness was always top notch.
Our Tech Pragmatism
As experienced professionals, one of the first pieces of advice to anyone jumping in to be an entrepreneur and make a difference -“Pick a focus area and be close to technology (don’t need to be a hands-on coder/developer but understand and adapt to tech and advancement around tech). If the focus area can make a difference in many lives, do not hesitate to pick it up.”
Niranjan says, “Here is how we see it – we may be running a services company, there are many organisations much more superior to us in size and scale, but in what we do, we want to make a difference continuously.”
“Over the last seven years, we have seen over 400 people employed with us at one time or the other, we have close to 200 active currently, and we would like to ensure that whatever time is spent with us makes a difference to them individually, their families and community” says Prasad.
Conquering New Horizons of XR
On envisioning ZiniosEdge’s operations with emerging technologies and automated tools that are revolutionizing the business world by enabling innovations, Prasad and Niranjan say that automation in many places has taken the world by storm. They have seen the industrial revolution due to automation in manufacturing, construction, automobiles and even medicine. While there was an initial notion that it would “replace” humans, they believe automation, used in the right way, has actually extended the skill of the human, and together, productivity has enhanced multi-fold. So, as they innovate and create new tech, products, and services, they are making things better for humans and nature, and this will continue to happen.
Having learnt over the last seven years and specifically around all the research and development done in many technologies, they are now moving in the direction of building their IP – a solution/platform that enables better ways to experience XR, a simple tech, a simple way to adapt XR into the product or solution of the adopter. The platform can be used in many ways – as providing a head start to a larger envisioned product in XR, a platform that complements the capabilities of the product being pictured by the adopter, a platform that can be used to white label, customize and enhancethe visions of the adopter. It will also be a platform that can be adapted quickly, with fewer hindrances/hurdles in integration to the adopter’s current platform and a low expectation of technology knowledge.
True to their initial thought of being domain agnostic, like XR can be an enhancer for every possible domain out there, they want their solution/platform to enable better products and businesses in any domain the adopter is in. Further improvements in the solution/product will be continually driven by adoption of new tech on a regular basis.
They are currently in beta and have some wonderful customers who have signed up for the beta program with some already going live with their platform/solution. They will be launching this very soon and expect that a lot of their existing customers will adopt it quickly. With a strong team passionate about this space and with support from their customers, this will further enhance them as a company, be a better brand and bring them growth over the next set of years.
Niranjan adds, “While the focus areas will be on XR, AI + AR, we will continue to be a company that focuses on bleeding tech, building great teams that can build greenfield or custom software to our customers, provide dedicated teams, augmented teams which will further enhance our customers’ capabilities and acquire customers from more geographies than we currently are in.”
“Thanks to everyone at ZiniosEdge, our customers, and our partners; we believe that with their focus and talent, we will make it happen!” concludes Prasad.
