1) Thanks for joining us, Nilesh. Tell us how you came to be the CEO of Emorphis. How much of your typical day involves innovating or ideating the Emorphis solutions for your customers?

Starting Emorphis Technologies was obviously not an abrupt decision, I had been contemplating about starting a company for almost two years prior to launching Emorphis Technologies. 

Prior to co-founding Emorphis, I was heading the mobility practice of a multinational IT company and was working with global clients and people with different streams. While working in my previous role, I realized that a job is not just about earning money or delivering software solutions but it has a higher purpose. One can bring happiness to many people if doing his/her job religiously, at the same time I also realized that professional & personal life can not be separated; both go hand in hand, I wanted to create a workplace that can be the epitome of personal & professional life balance. 

I envisioned a company where we can bring value for everyone, either employees or customers and with this vision as the foundation, I decided to start Emorphis. 

Today we are around 100 people strong company and have served many clients from around the globe but the most pleasing facts about Emorphis that I always brag about are - The first two clients of Emorphis are still our clients and the first four employees are still part of our team, this speaks volume about the character of Emorphis. 

We have created a core team that focuses completely on how we can create value for our clients and employees. I work very closely with our delivery heads, and we constantly talk about how we can bring delight to our clients. As a service company, we play an important role in the life of our clients, we bring their ideas to life, we make sure that our clients can focus on their core business, and we own every pain around the software development of our clients' products.  

2) Give us a quick overview of Emorphis. What motivated you to start a company in the first place, and what inspired the agency name?

I think up to a certain extent I have already answered the first part of your question (the motivation behind starting Emorphis).

I just want to add that Emorphis is a global IT services and product development company focused on strategic Innovation. We help our clients in building innovative products through the latest and greatest technologies. 

The name “Emorphis” actually was inspired by Metamorphosis, meaning transformation. Our goal with Emorphis is to bring transformation to the business, enterprises, and startups.  

Fail quickly and focus on lesser things.

~ Nilesh Maheshwari
 

3) What are some of the common pain points that your customers commonly approach you with?

Our customers trust us as their software development hand and they may choose to use our services for a number of reasons like - reducing the time to market for their product, reducing the development cost by leveraging our India based offshore development center, or using our staff augmentation services so that they can have the flexibility of scaling up or scaling down their team size as per their needs. 

In most cases, we work closely with the R&D team of our clients, we enable our clients to completely focus on their business and outsource everything related to software development to us.  

4) Any particular technology or industry you would be targeting? How do you plan to prepare your workforce for the post-pandemic world?

Being a service-based company, we need to have experts from a variety of fields and technology. We have very skilled & experienced teams working on various technologies - either we talk about legacy technologies like JAVA, .NET, PHP, RoR, etc., or modern-day technologies like iOS, Android, React Native, Angular.js, Node.js, etc. We have resources on almost all the technologies.  

However, we do have a special focus on certain domains, for example:

1. Mobility - Mobile apps are like oxygen for any organization, and they will continue to be our major focus in the coming years as well. We have served very known names in the mobility space like Khaleej Times, Jumeirah Hotels, Samsung, etc. 

2. Fintech - In the thesis space, we are catering to some of the best-known names like AXIS Bank, IDFC First Bank, Bajaj Finserv, etc. 

3. IoT - We have served Crompton Greaves in this domain, and we have developed our own IoT platform known as iThings.

4. Salesforce CRM - We started this practice two years back and it is one of the key domains that we would like to focus upon in the coming years. We have recently completed a salesforce project for Akshay Patra. 

5. Healthcare - We have developed solutions for many US-based healthcare startups; these products are HIPAA compliant and focus to achieve Value-based care. 

Post pandemic era is going to be very interesting for all of us, more and more companies are now open for offshore partners, and we are fully geared up to take on this challenge. We have made the necessary investment in tools to help us manage the remote workforce; we have also made necessary policy changes to smoothly absorb the remote working environment, and we continuously do activities to engage all the team members working from their homes. 

Going forward it seems that the hybrid working model will prevail where a mix of developers work from the office or home.
 

5) How does Emorphis differentiate itself from the competitors?

The fact that we don’t work as a service provider but we work as a solution provider differentiates us from all the competitors. We follow the design thinking principles and our focus is always on the end goal of our client. 

Following the above-mentioned process enables us to do what is right for our client instead of just only doing what we are asked to do. 

It happens so many times that the client asks us to do certain things in a certain way and there are other better ways available that the client is not even aware of, but we as solution providers always proactively suggest things to our clients and this approach makes the life of our client much easier. 

We firmly believe that our success is only when our clients succeed in achieving their goals.

6) How would you define your growth trajectory in 2020-2021? Any particular achievement? Any disappointment?

Fortunately, our business is not impacted by the COVID situation, and we could maintain our growth pattern even in this distress situation. From the point of the achievement, we have created a few innovative products that were needed during this time, like Samvaad (video conferencing platform), Face Mask Detection & touchless entry solution.

There is no disappointment as such, but there is a lot of learning gathered as individuals and businesses.

7) How did you manage the COVID crisis? What changes did it bring for Emorphis?

When it started in 2020 March, we were completely unsure about how COVID is going to impact largely, and to be honest, at that time we did not have any plan to address this. The primary importance was given to the health of all the teammates and we started working from home well in advance. We also insured all our employees & families for COVID 19. Like I said earlier, we invested in tools to make work from home easier, and most importantly, we trusted our teammates to take responsibility, as we never used any tracking tools, and I am proud to say that my team did not let me down. Our team maintains the highest amount of productivity throughout these covid times. 

The COVID era has brought altogether new perspectives to life (personal) and business (professional),  but definitely, we are much stronger as a team now. 

8) What's your flagship product?

Apart from our services, we have developed some innovative product like - 

iStatements  - Interactive digital statements, currently being used by some of the top banks and NBFCs in India. 

iThings - A complete IoT Platform 

Samvaad -  A video conferencing/ web conferencing platform (developed during COVID time). This platform is integrated with many Tele-Health and Education products

9) Other than technical expertise, what traits you believe are necessary for any app development firm to succeed in this rapidly evolving industry?

Honesty without any doubt. One has to be honest with his/her clients. When a company chooses to work with a development agency, they depend heavily on that firm. This is especially true as most of our clients are startups, they have a limited budget, and within their limited budget, they want their idea to be realized. 

We always believe in the “Honesty is the best policy” approach and we align all our endeavors with honesty & integrity at the center. 

10) You have award-winning 28 years’ experience in helping businesses transform their business model in the past. What are your tips for young entrepreneurs to accelerate their business growth?

I would say - Fail quickly and focus on lesser things. 

As a service provider, I have seen the budding entrepreneurs put a lot of time into making their product perfect, they want their product to do everything, they want to include all the features. Instead, they should go ahead with the core idea with limited features and improve the product as per the market feedback. 

One has to fail so many times before tasting the success, so if we can fail quickly enough, then we can taste success quickly. 

11) Could you please share your feedback on how MobileAppDaily has been doing so far in improving your visibility among potential clients?

MobileAppDaily is a very reputed source of information for all the budding entrepreneurs who are developing products in the mobility space. I believe MobileAppDaily is helping Emorphis beautifully in putting itself in front of the right audience. 

12) We have heard that you have a very joyful work culture, so can you share with us some of the fun pictures of your workplace?

You can see some of the pics at this link - 

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/12LYcfsd-FLcceCAGI60fh1yfSSbCFxDA?usp=sharing 
 

13) What is the one leadership motto you live by?

I think leadership is all about creating more leaders. 

I somewhere read “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together,'' and I do believe in this line; life is a marathon where moving fast is not as important as reaching the finish line, and since I am planning a long journey, I need a team that believes in my vision and shares the same values. We are creating a fully democratic organization, where giving full freedom to my teammates encourages them to make decisions for Emorphis. If the teammates make mistakes, we correct them together, and if the teammates bring good results, we enjoy them together.