Challenge
The client is a market leader in Enterprise data protection solutions. The client has different backup and recovery product solutions for different market segments like Small, Medium and Large Enterprise organizations, One of their end point data protection product was ageing and the client was planning to move it to the EOL category. At the same time they were also exploring ideas with partners to extend the product life and also support customers. Mindtree was already engaged with this customer for 1 year as an extended team. Mindtree proposed a plan to take complete ownership of the product. The plan also
- Defined short and long term roadmap for the product with some aggressive and state of the art storage technologies being introduced into the product
- Included Product Engineering investments by Mindtree with a proposal to share product revenues between Mindtree and the client including quarterly payouts based on product quarterly revenue performance
- Every new logo win ( Product User License ) added to both partners revenues, A win-win arrangement with no investment by client on the product development and a royalty share of product revenues for Mindtree
- ear 2016 –saw Mindtree & the client share revenues to the tune of millions
It took Mindtree 5 weeks to take complete ownership of the product. Within 1 year team size reached its peak size to delivering key features but later the team size was reduced and the reduced numbers continue today.
Mindtree Solution
- Mindtree changed the development and release processes from waterfall taking 1+ year per release to Agile with releases lined up for every quarter
- “No Code Change Test Strategy” helped take existing product quickly into Cloud space with deployment tweaks and qualification efforts
- State of the art feature inclusions release after release
- “Continuous Platform/Software Proliferation Testing” – Upfront qualification planning of upcoming OSs ( Windows, Mac ), Office Suites ( MSO, Lotus Notes ) and Mobile OSs ( iOS and Android )
- External & Internal Validation Programs – Structured BETA Programs, EOOC and High Touch Point Programs helped deliver high quality product – Mindtree is the ultimate quality gate – What it clears goes out to market
Business Impact
- Product revenues grew 2.5 times in 3 years
- A sudden surge in customer interest – Both new licenses and existing annual subscribers
- A decade old product still competes and makes revenues with much younger products with almost ZERO engineering investment by customer
- Product entered the SMAC stack space
- Higher margins and higher revenues with a relatively small team
