As the new year dawns, one cannot help but reflect on the fantastic year we have had. Industry growing steadily, with many incumbents embarking on major expansion plans in the city and tech players like Uber, Google and Amazon announcing serious plans for the city.
Simultaneously serious efforts at moving up the value chain from simple services and offshored development to high value consulting, domain solutions, IP-led services and in many cases even building products. With the great cushion that present industry offers, it was but inevitable that the innovation ecosystem also starts to bloom. And how!
The year started off with bringing together the Hyderabad startup ecosystem players and enablers under the Hyderabad4Inn-ovation ecosystem network meeting. It has now been subsumed into T-Hub. This laid the grounds for a much more intense collaboration and network effect amplification.
And towards end of the year, it all coming together in the fantastic initiative, T-Hub, with its world class incubator building that is now the largest incubator in the country — seriously enabling startups of all hues and shades from idea stage through VC stage.
Amidst all this energy, the environment also had liberal doses of reality check. The seemingly easily available investor money of 2014-15 started to dry up, with money now chasing more serious opportunities and teams.
The seemingly unstoppable growth of the larger startups also got a reality dampener with many in good and aggregation space actually scaling back now. The me-too-money chasing artificially hyped sectors like food are getting redirected towards more substance.
Many seed funds have come up just in Hyderabad this year that are all now looking at smart-money; investments coupled with serious mentoring and maybe even physical incubator based acceleration.
The existing networks like Hyderabad Angels have grown stronger. Most national investor houses are now seriously looking at Hyderabad. Many national and international acceleration programmes are also seriously exploring starting operations in Hyderabad. 2016, here comes Hyderabad!
The year already off to a great start with many national and international leaders now thinking about Hyderabad. Satya Nadella and Vishal Sikka being at T-Hub on a single day this week is a reflection of what all we can expect in 2016.
Alongside the conventional startups in the commerce and consumer space, serious technology startups are also emerging. Spurred further by the product prototyping centres and makerspaces or labs starting to mushroom in the city.
In 2016 we will see more device and gadget startups. We will see a revival of technology platform startups that were a mainstay in the city’s then very small tech startup space in 2000, which that had serious players in Pramati (Java App Servers) and Yasu (Rules Engines) that effectively competed with international majors like IBM, Sun and Oracle.
All of these further fuelled by some great ideas getting prototyped from the various college initiatives including IoT Makerspaces and a wide range of hackathons and prototyping events. This time next year, Hyderabad will seriously place some great value and results on startup map. Watchout!
(The writer is the vice-president and managing director, Progress Software)
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