We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Indu Aromal. We hope’ ‘you’ll enjoy our conversation with Indu below.

Indu, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s jump right into the heart of things. Outsiders often think businesses or industries have much larger profit margins than they actually do – the reason is that outsiders are often unaware of the biggest challenges to profitability in various industries – what’s the biggest challenge to profitability in your industry?

Software Service as an industry is the most sought after. Yet, at the same time, you compete with companies globally, from different countries, and at different hourly billing rates, with no clear standardization criteria for differentiation. How much ever we try to differentiate our services using detailed proposals detailing processes and ‘ ‘criteria’s that makes your product look superior compared to the competition, the difference in rates from a different city or a different country, makes it very difficult to bag the projects at the desired billing rate. This poses a bigger challenge to profitability. We face situations where adjustment to billing rates based on the client’s geography is needed. Yet, it’s not easy to keep changing a ‘ ‘project’s quality process or internal development processes based on the billing rates of the client. So as we build the organization for better processes and quality of people, we always will struggle with profitability for a certain segment of customers.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that, can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?

I’ve been working in the software services, cloud, and technology space for the past 19 years, both as an entrepreneur building the business with a global client base and as a technologist who has been heading the development & digital transformation teams at Carmatec. Carmatec is a digital transformation company and works extensively with startups, SMEs, and enterprises across the globe to be part of their digital roadmap and transformation journey. Our USP is the exposure to the entire digital journey of a customer, from digital marketing to all digital touchpoints, Backend Systems, Business Automation, and API Development for data enrichment, intelligence, and analytics. We specialize in UI/UX to architecture, design & development of web and mobile applications, as well as hosting & cloud services and topping it up with GoTo Market plans, digital marketing services, etc. So it’s a full bouquet of digital services that we offer, and every customer has their own portfolio of services that we offer for them.
We mainly enable businesses to evolve digitally, to go paperless, automate, and solve bottlenecks that the end customer is facing. We also love working with startups to build the MVP of their product, help them in business analysis & market research, and closely work with them on enriching the customer experience side of the application.
We’re most proud of the fact that we have been in this industry and software services space since 2004 and have always kept the company updated with the latest technologies and developments in this space.

Carmatec, during its initial days, operated under the brand InstaCarma and offered technical support services for data centers and hosting companies worldwide. This gave the company a strong DNA of technology as the work involved working with hundreds of open-source platforms and tinkering with its codebase at times. During 2008 we diversified into developing web apps, UI/UX, full-funnel digital marketing, and the full spectrum of cloud technologies. The company currently works with SMEs, Startups, and enterprises in the whole digital transformation space in more than 24 countries.
On the personal front, you can call me a technology evangelist & Entrepreneur with multi-dimensional experience working in Technology, Operations, HR, Finance, and Product Strategy over the past 19 years. However, my key focus and passion have always been technology. Adopting new technology stacks in different industry verticals and domains is the most exciting part of my role.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

When an organization has been running for almost 19 years, and it works with its inherent DNA and culture that it becomes very difficult to change or reset it. Any changes driven by the top management get diluted when it comes to lower levels due to the influence of the existing thought process and people in the system, and we struggled with change management. Trying to fix it through different ways, change drivers, engagement programs, and external consultants made only marginal differences, and we never succeeded in really making the sort of difference that was needed in the system.
We could actually transform this when we became 100% work from home, and when the new staff we brought in did not have an influence from the existing employees, we could effortlessly mold them to the new processes and work culture. It threw light on how much the mindset of the existing employees influenced those newcomers and how change management can be a struggle in such scenarios.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

We have had a few cases of business setbacks during our 19-year journey. The first one was when we had the global depression way back in 2008, and we were in the data center and hosting industry during that time. The hosting industry was getting consolidated due to the recession; more than 50% of our clients got merged with bigger companies who didn’t need our services. We lost many clients at almost the same time, with no hope of acquiring new ones, and a couple of business partners left during that time as they didn’t see a point in carrying forward with the brand. We had a choice to make then, to either move to a different business or turn around by innovating the business model, and we chose the second option to reposition our services and launch two major brands that have grown to be the best in that space worldwide – RailsCarma and Colorcuboid Designs offering software development and UI/UX Services. RailsCarma is now ranked among the top 5 Ruby on Rails development companies in US , Europe and India. In no time within a year, this had changed the profile of the company and opened up numerous opportunities for us to expand in this space.
A similar thing happened in 2017 due to some internal business issues, and we had major revenue loss, which forced us to completely revisit the business model and scale down the business, focusing on just the bottom line. It took almost two years to turn it around, with the pandemic bringing another layer of uncertainty in the industry, but business is all about constantly pitching for opportunities, and if you hang in there, you’ll definitely come out with not just getting over the problem but with a completely new perspective on how to grow the business. Every roadblock can pave the way to new opportunities and new openings if you have the resilience to overcome it and turn it around, and I have had this experience multiple times in the journey of Carmatec.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.carmatec.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/carmatec/
• Linkedin: https://in.linkedin.com/company/carmatec-it-solution-p-ltd-
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/Carmatec/