Interview with Sumeet Arora, CTO and Founder - Evon Technologies

Sumeet Arora  

CTO and Founder, Evon Technologies

Give us a quick overview on Evon Technologies. When and how did you begin this journey and what were your motives to be successful in app development?

Evon Technologies is a team of 250+ technology enthusiasts & evangelists. It offers state of the art tech consulting and development services to Startups & SMEs. It started its operations back in 2006 when its partners saw the opportunity in establishing an offshore development company in the IT service industry. Being originally from Dehradun itself gave the partners more reason to establish the company in their hometown and grow it there. The motive of the company when it started was to provide a low cost development team to companies looking for offshore partners in their product development, Dehradun being a low cost city helped in achieving a low cost centre till date.

What is your role in the management and development of Evon Technologies? 

Being the founder and partner in the company there are many roles that need to be played. One of them is heading the management board of the company, wherein taking all the important decisions for the company such as revenue forecasting, budgeting, resourcing, team build ups, quarterly review of company performance. Then being a CTO there is a technocrat role that comes in naturally wherein have to head the team of technical architects, introduce new domain/technology in the company, manage, and build various internal tools of the company viz. Findnerd, Gamentio.

Tell us about your biggest achievement in the industry

In the early stages of company sometime in 2007 we were involved in a client’s project wherein we have to build and manage a very large scale backend infrastructure which has the ability to support 1 million concurrent users, the scale of this can also be measured with the fact that the servers that were being used had a monthly billing of 400K USD. This knowledge of the backend made us who we are today and made our transition to cloud infrastructure very quick and easy.

How do you schedule the development phases of the apps to promise the timeline to your clients?

We follow the incremental model in Agile development methodology in which there are Sprints/releases divided in the due course of the project. This ensures that the client receives regular updates of the product to be developed such that the review cycle is short which in turn keeps the timeline on track. This avoids the idea to provide the finished product towards the end of the project to the client which is bound to have a lot of review time consumed and affects the overall timeline.

How do you help your clients in choosing the right yet profitable platform for app development?

During the pre-sales activity of the project our consultants in the company work with the client in identifying the market they are trying to reach with their app. For instance, in the USA where there is more prevalent use of iPhone it is wiser to have an iOS app first, in contrast if you are targeting in African nations then there Android is quite prevalent and hence its app should be developed first. The final call is always with clients but working as a consultant out team does assist clients in reaching a decision.

Which would you suggest for a successful and profitable business progression, Native or hybrid apps? How do you define the factors that influenced you to make this choice?

Nowadays we are seeing that both Native and Hybrid apps are being developed in the industry quite comparatively. Had it been 5-6 years back then Hybrid technologies were quite nascent and it was somewhat difficult in building apps in hybrid. Today when we develop the apps we consult with the client on their likeness. Some may want to develop it in native to give seamless experience to their end clients and not worry about hybrid technologies and their limitations. Some say a startup may want to keep their cost low initially and want to develop a hybrid app instead which is faster and less expensive to develop. Sometime we have also seen that if the requirement of the app is such that it needs to be integrated with a third party library for which Hybrid integration is not available, then the obvious choice is to go with Native.

How do you scheme your pricing model? How do you fix your budget?

We, like others, have a rate card in the company which is proportional to a resourceful experience. This rate card is fixed and is shared with every client and then based on the project whether it is fixed price or time & material the relative cost is calculated, we do like to keep 20-25% as company margin on this cost.

How helpful are the mobile apps developed by your team, for enhancing your clients’ business?

Our Mobile development team is the biggest team of all the teams in our company. This was made possible because more than 70% of our clients who come to us are looking for mobile apps in their project. The nature of the apps built are such that they provide easy accessibility to a user who can download the app and use the application and its main features with ease, the concept here is everyone these days has a smart phone and all love using apps from anywhere.

What according to you are the best practices to attain client satisfaction?

We have a well laid out escalation matrix that is shared with the client right from the beginning. Clients can use the matrix and escalate things if they arrive and be assured of corrective actions to be taken. Working in an offshore model we understand that it’s a quite virtual work environment out there hence to gain confidence of the client we do have assigned following in every major project, apart from team members – Account Manager, Project Manager, Business Analyst, Team Lead, these resources bring with them their unique set of skills which is used in making the client appeased during the course of the project.

How do you update your business system to be in pace with the technological advancements?

We understand clearly that the goal of the software we develop is to generate business value for our clients. So, all our efforts and processes are geared towards that end only. We constantly look at our processes and how we can increase the efficiency, ensure quality, and deliver the shortest time to market so as to keep our clients at the forefront of innovation and in step with the tech advancements. The early adaptation of DevOps and DevSecOps models by us has been the result of this thought process only. With these approaches, we are able to automate the delivery processes, shorten the development lifecycle, and ensure high quality while at the same time freeing up our teams to update their skills and knowledge to meet the ever increasing and ever more sophisticated demands of tomorrow.

What are your thoughts about AR, VR and Internet of Things (IoT)?

AR – AR is really growing and our skills in OpenCV, Neural Nets and complex vision algorithms have already helped us create wonderful solutions for clients. We have worked on simple marker based teaching games where things pop up and dance on books or boards (when looked through the phone) to complex AR applications on Snooker. We keep getting enquiries about iPad based AR card games as well, so things sure are getting exciting on AR front.

VR – VR mostly requires designing skills, environment artists and 3D modelers and we have excellent people for it. Having said that, I think VR is still at an early stage and still requires a lot of professional work in order to progress into full scale adoption and production. Nevertheless, I'd say that in 3-5 years, VR will become the norm, if not the standard, for games and entertainment.

IoT – We see a lot of scope in this field because it covers the widest range of solutions that directly impacts day to day happenings of the world. Right from the households, to supply chains to MNCs and governments, IoT has a lot to offer to each sphere of life. We think if anyone in our industry doesn’t adapt and cater to the problems that IoT promises to solve, they will be left behind.

What do you think will be the future of Mobile technology?

We do see a tremendous bright future in mobile technology. Today we do see mobiles which come with so much power packed hardware that they shame out certain basic computers. As the world is changing to mobile apps in the past years we do see more and more businesses making an app either for their existing legacy systems or creating a fresh mobile app. Earlier in the days we used to think mobile apps were just limited to social apps but more recently during the Covid-19 lockdown, informative and safety apps to prevent people from the infection have been introduced and they have become the most used apps as well. Similarly we have seen another trend where the need is to have collaborative video call apps, Google, Whatsapp, Facebook all of them update or enhance their apps to allow more and more users to have video calls on their apps. So what we are trying to say in these examples is that there will always be a need for a novel product in the market depending upon the need of the hour and any company fulfilling this need will have a tremendous popularity.