“Knowlarity is my safest billion dollar idea”: CEO & Founder, Ambarish Gupta

Author by Anushruti Singh

Ambarish Gupta, CEO and Founder of Gurgaon-based cloud telephony startup Knowlarity Communications shared his startup journey in an interactive session. Ambarish is a  graduate in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur also his home town. He  holds a MBA degree from Carnegie Mellon University, USA.

How did Knowlarity came into your mind?

I consider Knowlarity to be my safest million dollar idea, so our idea was that if the consumers have telephone, definitely they are going to call business through that and business here would mean to manage calls.

When we started, most of the newly established businesses didn’t have their own offices or any help desk, so here we came in. We wanted to host a technology for them where there will be no need to have hardware in the offices.  We, in India wanted to manage business calls for them.

It was very difficult for us to develop that technology here in India, but here we are now with the largest providers in this segment of cloud telephony.

The issue is to get the cloud telephony on rationalized cost. How things are managed by you?

The whole process is centralized and we aggregate on that matter. We are managing the network through four data centers and have million of phone numbers providing the services to more than 1500 businesses around.

The cost that the users are paying is worth paying for the services that we provide that to without any hassles.

How many data centers are you having in India and how many are there outside the country?

In total we have 11 data centers, out of them in India we have 4 and rest of them we have outside the country.

Are you focusing only on the emerging geographies around the world for the expansion?

Yes, as there is a large market out there who wants the services that we offer. The emerging and large market never wants to invest in machines so here we come in for them.

Our services become more powerful here as there is already cloud computing in the emerging geographies.

There are a lot of integrations we are doing which includes SAP and Microsoft as well. So we have golden data through which one can do a lot.

Since India is a diversified country, do you support the multiple languages in your services?

We have started with Hindi and English as of now and will definitely grow with time on this. We are pretty strong in south but the voice analytic part is not supported currently.

How is the security aspect taken care of?

The cloud system is pretty secure and we trust that as cloud has never disappointed us. We have never faced any hacking or something till date. There is no risk of hardware crashing etc. in case of cloud.

Apart from the SMB section, is there any focus on large entrepreneurs as far as your services are concerned?

Yes, the companies like Amazon, Uber, E-bay, Zomato, and ICICI banks, are our customers. They have deployed different services. There is a virtual call centre then there is a call whispering, call recording, data analytics service. We also provide the data like who is calling who at what time etc.

Are you into any government projects right now?

We don’t work too much with the government, there are many services by us that can be used by the government bodies but getting into government is a difficult job. As a GTM strategy we don’t have such schemes right now.

Earlier, we were involved in some projects like Mid Day Meal where there were a concern raised that the kids were not getting food and then we were asked to verify. It was a very successful project. But for now we are not into any government projects.

What is GTM strategy, since you work through partners also?

We work both ways; directly also and indirectly also. We have close to 200 people in sales and have a large network of channel partners. We have close to 500 partners dealing around for us.

Are the channel partners categorized?

We have horizontal and vertical partners; where the verticals see the larger part of the market and horizontal partners deal into smaller sections. With time we are shifting horizontals to verticals now as the company is progressing.

What is the roadmap of the company?

We are trying to refine the consumer business management and definitely hope to improve the customer experience.