|
 Rakesh
Mathur, founder and chairman and Nimish Mehta, CEO of
Stratify spoke to Prashant L Rao about the reason the company
changed its name from Purple Yogi to the current one, changes
in the way the company is doing business today and Amazon's
recent first-ever profit.
*
Why did you change your company's
name from Purple Yogi to Stratify?
Rakesh: We found that we needed to sell software as a service
to CIOs of large companies which required a different approach
from the name or brand that you needed for consumer retention.
Stratify is a better corporate brand.
Nimish: Purple Yogi was a playful and memorable name but not
right for a target audience of CIOs. We took inputs from employees
and investors. We even hired a naming firm and narrowed it
down to a bunch of names. Our criterion was that the name
had to represent the value and it had to be available as a
trademark and domain name. Stratify represents the stratification
of information which is what we are addressing.
* Can you tell us about your customer acquisitions in the
past year and your target for 2002?
Nimish: We have signed up many large companies in the last
year. A lot of re-engineering needed to be done. For instance,
we had to ensure that our software could be installed behind
a firewall. We took the direct selling route starting in Sept
2001 when the software shipped. Our customers include Infosys
and the CIA. We are in the process of signing up four more
customers. If we have less than 10-15 customers by the end
of 2002, I will be disappointed.
* What is the product positioning of Stratify?
Rakesh: We are trying to build a company that will be the
Oracle of unstructured information. If we deliver on our mission
we will be a very large enterprise software company.
* Purple Yogi was available as a free download. Will it
be the same with Stratify?
Nimish: We are happy to install a pilot for any company that
gives us $50,000 to $100,000 for an evaluation. Stratify is
not giving free demos.
* What’s the technology behind Stratify?
Nimish: We do for unstructured data (e-mail, office documents)
what Oracle does for structured data.
Rakesh: To write applications for a structured database you
need a database schema. We have a schema for unstructured
data. Our software works with Lotus Notes, MS Exchange, MS
Office, Adobe Acrobat, HTML and text files.
* What is your take on Amazon.com making its first profit?
Rakesh: I am a big believer that a certain portion of retail
will be done online. It's a winner take all situation. While
a $5 million profit on $1 billion revenues may not seem like
much, scaling will not be linear. At $2 billion revenues you
will be surprised at the profits.
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