Movers & Shakers interview with Arvind Kumar, Founding Member & CEO – Attune Technologies
Arvind is Founder CEO of Attune, a visionary healthcare IT Product Company that delivers next generation cloud based healthcare IT products to the global healthcare market. With 6+ years of operation, 200+ employees and with more than 8.6 million patient records & transactions, the company is a pioneer in cloud based LIMS & HIMS and is successfully delivering technology to over 150 clients in more than 12 countries through 2500+ centres and is backed by Norwest Venture Partners, a global multistage investment firm. Besides Attune, Arvind is the Founding and Management Committee member of Gnyan Prabodh, an NGO working towards eliminating illiteracy in India. He was one of the founding members of the trust with a modest sponsorship of 3 students in year 1999 and grew the trust to sponsor 313 students in the year 2007. In total, 700 students with the sponsorship amount of Rs. 17 Lakhs have been disbursed by the trust. Arvind is also a Professional cricketer and has represented his district and state in various tournaments. He is an excellent orator and a vivid thinker excited about innovation.
1. Attune Technologies is a renowned company in the Healthcare IT Services market. Can you share some key milestones the company has achieved over the years?
Attune started operations in India in December 2008. Within the first 6 months of operations, we successfully deployed our software and went live with our key pilot customer. In early 2010, we received our Angel round of funding from Mercatus Capital and incorporated the holding company in Singapore. We then went on to win a contract with Medall Healthcare, one of the largest lab chains in India in 2011, and ended the year on a high note with the commencement of our operations in the Philippines.
The year 2012 turned out to be landmark for us when we signed a contract with Metropolis, the leading lab chain in India and closed the year with Series A investment from Norwest Venture Partners (NVP).
In June 2013, we expanded our operations to Indonesia with RS Sanglah Hospital – one of the largest government hospitals in the country and celebrated onboarding of Thyrocare in India the very next year. More recently, in June 2015, we received our Series B funding from Qualcomm Ventures and NVP.
The growth over the years has been phenomenal and we now have operations in 14 countries and manage over 10 million patients’ health records on Cloud.
2. Can you share with us your future expansion plans and the strategic road map to achieve them?
Attune, currently, has operations in 14 countries. Our goal is to become the preferred partner for healthcare organizations around the world and a global leader in the healthcare technology domain. We are currently focusing on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and Southeast Asia. You will soon see us in the European and American markets as well.
3. Do you have any plans for external funding, JV/Acquisitions or any kind of partnerships in India to meet your expansion drive?
We are open to funding and acquisitions. Our goal is to hit revenue of $100 million and establish ourselves as a leading participant in the emerging markets. Once we achieve this objective, we will consider acquisitions. However, right now the focus is on growing the business organically.
In Cloud and Software as a Service (SaaS) companies, the traditional channel partnership models do not exist. Cloud providers such as Microsoft and Amazon establish a strategic partnership with independent software providers for cross-selling vendor products in their Cloud and vice versa. We will also look for such strategic partnerships going forward.
4. There are many companies who are offering or are planning to offer services on Cloud in future; some of them are really well-known and established participants. What do you consider as your key business differentiators?
We are early participants in adopting the Cloud technology for healthcare applications and that, we believe, gives us a head start by a few years and the inherent first-mover advantage.
Our key differentiators include:
- Modular solutions and configurable workflows
- Robust data architecture for analysis
- Scalability from a single general practice clinic to a national healthcare network through multi-tenancy
- Truly SaaS and customizable product suite
5. Would you classify yours as a success story? Are you satisfied with the progress Attune Technologies has made so far and its contribution to the Healthcare IT space of India?
That depends on how you define success. We believe that success is a journey rather than one specific destination. The dreams and plans become bigger as you move ahead and as the organization matures. We set out to build a large company with the vision of being global leaders in the healthcare IT domain, and we are currently in the process of realizing that vision. We have a suite of cutting-edge products and solutions that are changing the landscape of the healthcare industry and, true to our brand’s positioning of ‘Innovation Infinite’, we will continue to innovate.
6. Please comment on the innovative customer connect models undertaken by Attune Technologies to enhance client excellence and satisfaction. Please highlight some of the retention strategies followed.
At Attune, we are focused completely on the needs and pain points of the customers and how we can help them solve key business problems. We like to tie our success to the client’s success. In order to live the promise of a customer-centric approach, we recently established a customer success team that works around the clock and is dedicated to providing support, trouble shooting, and training to ensure that customers derive maximum value from the product.
We understand that implementing software has challenges akin to change management and we use a top-down approach to ensure that the key decision makers and the team involved on the customers’ side are completely onboard with our implementation roll-out plan.
Above all, we maintain a strong and continuous relationship with our clients, working together as a single team focused on the project. The implementation and going live of the software is considered the beginning of the relationship rather than end of a sale. We work closely with the customers’ teams to ensure that they get more out of our products and optimize the solution. This is the reason that our customers swear by our implementation team and voluntarily offer their personal time to speak to our prospects and their own peers in the industry about the value we bring to the table.
7. The pricing in the industry varies significantly from vendor to vendor, client to client, market to market. What kind of price policies and positioning are expected by Attune technologies over next two to three years?
When it comes to pricing, we follow a hybrid model of SaaS and licensing, depending on several factors. Our pricing policies are modeled on the revenue drivers of our customers and we work relentlessly to ensure their success. We want to position ourselves as leaders in the health technology space and we believe that even for pricing strategy, a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach is not appropriate. We work on understanding the customers’ business dynamics and challenges and we like to tie our pricing to achieving their business goals. Basically, we ensure that we have a skin in the game, which we find is warmly welcomed by our prospects and customers.