Post expansion, LogMeIn sees huge business growth in India

BANGALORE, INDIA: In the past one year, collaboration services provider LogMeIN has doubled its headcount in India. It has been three years since the company started its India operations and interestingly 50 percent of its new APAC business now comes from India.

Excerpts from interview with Anil Sharma, director, LogMeIn India:

CIOL: How do you see the Collaboration market evolving in India?

Anil Sharma:The collaboration market is at an exciting stage, as far as uptake is concerned. Its healthy growth is evident from the increasing volume of adoption. According to Gartner, India's share of the software market in Asia/Pacific is expected to reach 12.1 percent by 2016, representing $5.4 billion in revenue.

The fastest-growing segments within the software market will be Web conferencing and team collaboration followed by enterprise content management and CRM.

Information workers are proactively adopting collaboration services on multiple devices. Smartphones and iPads are the new indispensable IT tools in every company. The Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend has changed the way information is accessed and shared by employees across the globe and has urged IT departments to consider mobility as the core of their IT strategies.

Further to this, according to Gartner "Bring Your Own Application (BYOA) has become as important as BYOD in the development of a comprehensive mobile strategy," as enterprises look to maintain control of their IT operations. It is predicted that by 2017 one quarter of enterprises will have an enterprise app store for managing corporate-sanctioned apps on PCs and mobile devices.

Currently, collaboration technologies are being widely deployed to not just reduce operational costs, but also to boost productivity. Clearly the use of collaboration infrastructure will continue to grow, especially in light of the present state of the global economy.

CIOL: Can you elaborate on LogMeIn and its offerings in the collaboration space?

AS: Join.me and cubby are two solutions that cater to the collaboration technology. join.me is a fast, simple, lightweight screen sharing and online product. It offers free online meetings for both personal and commercial use to up to 250 participants - no registration, plug-ins or accounts required.

Cubby is the new cloud sync and storage service from LogMeIn. Cubby is available in both free Cubby Basic version as well as in premium Cubby Pro version. Cubby is a simple, secure cloud service for sharing files across devices and with other people.

Cubby Basic provides users with a free, yet simple and secure cloud service for accessing information from virtually any device and sharing files with other people via the cloud, and includes 5GB of storage. "DirectSync," is an unique feature with Cubby Pro.

 

It lets users sync folders directly across both web and mobile devices without counting toward users online storage limits. It also comes with a 100GB of optional cloud storage. 

CIOL: What does join.me and cubby integration mean? And how would this benefit the users?

Sharma: The integration between join.me and Cubby extend's the collaborative benefits of join.me beyond online meetings, the integration will now offer a simple, secure way to capture and share real-time collaboration sessions, either as a follow-up for participants or as a means of sharing the meeting's content with a broader audience.

Join.me's integration with Cubby, makes the collaboration tool more business enterprise-ready product. With the integration, now Join.me users will be able to record their meetings from the web, e PC or the Mac desktop apps, etc. Once the meeting is recorded, the meetings can then be stored in an online "Cubby," which can be accessed either through Join.me or via Cubby directly.

The recorded meetings can be sharde with others via a link, or by inviting them to the Cubby service. The meetings are recorded in .webm format, and can be played in natively in Chrome or Firefox, in other browsers via a plug-in, or directly from Join.me itself. The meeting recordings show up online in about half the time of the meeting itself - so for example, a 60-minute meeting would be available online in around 30 minutes.

CIOL: Detail LogMeIn's clients in India and its India plan?

Sharma: In the past one year we have doubled our work force in India, It has been three years since we started our India operations. India has been a very significant and strategic market to us. Close to 50 pc of our new APAC business this year has come from India.

The key markets/ verticals that we plan to target in India are managed service providers, outsourced IT services organizations and Mobile Service Providers. Any organization providing Technical Support to internal & external customer can benefit from our solution(s).

We have both large enterprises and SMBs as our customers in India. WNS, Genpact, Accenture, Quattro,Happiest Minds, etc. are some of the large enterprises using our solutions. IN Technologies, Glopore, Lester Inc, etc. are the technical support organizations based in India who have been using our solutions. India is an important market to us and we will continue to invest heavily in India.