Introduction:

Zonixsoft is an offshore software development company providing valuable outsourcing

services to its worldwide clients. We have been in industry for last five years offering IT
services to various market segments. Our Mission is to build strategic partnerships with our
customers to help them achieving next level. Today, customers need partners to take away
their execution pains and provide end to end responsibility of execution.

History:
Zonixsoft started with 4 people team from a small apartment with an investment of USD
3000. Today, we have global presence and leaders in application development, maintenance,
migrations and integrations offering solutions on different platforms like Microsoft.NET, PHP,
android and IOs. Since our journey from 2009, many of our customers rely on us for
providing technical solutions and guidance on IT strategy and governance.

Kanav Gupta, founder of Zonixsof:

An average college going student from the streets of Jammu city passed B.C.A in 2005
annual. Jammu being known as the city of temples hardly has a software company in 2005
which can consume any software professionals or provide trainings to professionals. In a
crowd of people, he also decided to do MBA and went to Delhi to take coaching classes in
Delhi but as you never know what destiny holds for you and what circumstances one need to
face in life.

After joining the coaching classes, he decided to join a job in a BPO from where he can take
care of his monthly expenses. He joined IBM Daksh as a customer support executive to
resolve customers queries online via a web platform for an International Telecoms process.
He worked there an year and took all the positives with him like learnt soft skills, writing
skills engaging with customers and the most effective learning acknowledging someones
work is very important. Either its a team member, waiter serving you in a restaurant, a
person cleaning your home, cleaning the office etc. Its a fact acknowledging and
appreciating some ones work puts smile on their face and urges them to work more
efficiently and effectively. Its one of the best learning he got to know while working in IBM
Daksh when his customers appreciate his work. It was the start for him where he started
realizing his capabilities of doing things.
In 2006, appeared for many entrance exams like MAT, CAT and got shortlisted in many of the
MBA institutes but unfortunately due to familys financial conditions he was unable to go
further for MBA and decided to move forward on its own. Almost, a year he did not do
anything left his job and dedicated him to the world of internet. He started learning
programs online and finally learnt basics of a programming language named Microsoft.NET
which becomes the route to his next job and joined as a fresher in 2007 in a software MNC
in Ahmedabad, Gujrat. Now, the next phase of the journey started and as someone rightly
said its easy to fall in a love relation but the successful is the one who maintains it till the
end. There were a lot of hurdles after joining the job in a software company as soon he
realised most of the people speak Gujarati (their mother tongue) to which he was not very
much familiar and sometime it took me hours to understand specially when its coming from
the Managers or top level management where you wont be allowed to question much and
even in team meetings. Where there is a will, there is a way also he made some Gujarati
friends and started learning a bit of Gujarati and .NET (programming language) both from
them. After 6 months of hard work, working in day and night to understand different
architectures, technical terms and business logics got some confidence to deliver something
at his own and got his first salary increment. He worked there almost for 2 and half years
and contributed to IT from the best of his capabilities and made a good will among his
clients. Along with the job he did MCA as well from Punjab Technical University in
correspondence.

Financial conditions starts getting better but it was not his aim to get a good job and settle
down in a MNC. He always had a dream of providing employment in his own home town in
Jammu. He does not want the youth from his home town to look for jobs in other states and
leave their home for survival. To take this initiative he put all his efforts spending sleepless
nights and finding a client on his own over the internet. As its not easy to get work online
and get paid so he decided to offer FREE services where he met his first Client from Ireland
and offered him a free website at no cost and only wanted to show case his work to the
world. He did his first website for no money but on schedule and delivered it nicely finished
product as per his abilities, did the design himself and developed it himself too. It took him
almost for 2 weeks to deliver his 1st project. After the delivery of the 1 st project his client
decided to offer him more work but this time with EUROS and the journey begins to
Zonixsoft.

He delivered few good projects and decided in Sep., 2009 to open up his own company in
Jammu where he can provide employment to the youth of Jammu. But setting up an
organization is not that easy because it requires funds, investments, resources and much
more. He left his job and started working dedicatedly for his clients and started finding other
clients as well to live his dream. From Sep, 2009 till Feb 2010, there was only 1 person
working for Zonixsoft.
On 10th of Mar, 2010 he set up his own office with one developer and three trainees. Now,
things been changed its not something that he need to do at his own and for his own but to
cater others as well. Everything was set up nicely but it was not easy for junior resources to
deliver the projects and on schedule for international clients. He took couple of projects on
board but the resources were not well trained so there were so many hurdles to move
further like Development of difficult tasks, Time delivery and on schedule, expertise,
patience, customer relationship management, making guidelines for the developers and
guiding them to do development in the right direction. So, there were a lot of things needs
to be taken care of by one person. Actually turned out to be a lot of burden and do not have
extra funds or resources to help and keep the things going smoothly.

Challenges:

1. Communication with Clients

2. Turning those communications into tasks and making Project Execution plans
3. Allocating resources to specific tasks by considering their expertise
4. Timely Deliveries
5. Internal Communication
6. Expertise on Technology
7. Costs, Investments and budget considerations
8. Availability of infrastructure to make things available for the clients
9. Planning for new projects and making proposals to keep the budget cycle moving
10. Another Challenge was to work against nature i.e in the nights because most of the
clients work on U.S time zone and prefer to communicate on the same.
11. Maintaining Long Term Relations with the clients
12. Training for Employees and polishing their communication skills

To overcome the above the challenges, below are the few things those he implemented,
learnt and still implementing with continuous success of the last 5 years.

1. To provide a better communication to the clients across the globe on different time
zones, initially tried to work for more than 16 hours a day/night. But thats of-course
not a long term solution. Also another major issues was, client talks to me tell the
requirements might not be able to recall the same to the developer 20% of the
info I might skip which further causes issue during development and deliverables.
However, I always believe its the fault of Team Leader always not the developer or
junior resource as per their expertise. So a better Team Leader is the one who takes
all the blame and gives credit to the Team for all the success.

2. To make sure every client request gets entertained, implemented project

management system where every client will have access to a particular project and
 all the employees too respectively. This actually resolved the problem of
communication to a greater extent where employees are able to communicate
directly with the clients via PMS.
3. Technical Expertise for the trainees and employees was another challenge so that
people within the organization could move to next levels. So there is no other better
medicine for the staff rather than encouraging them, appreciating their work and
giving them justified amount of perks on time based upon their performance. Give
them the time study themselves and avail the infrastructure to them so that they can
study on their own.

4. After implementing the above solutions, things started to get better but still there
were some obstacles to bring the clients to a platform (PMS) to communicate with
developers as most of the clients are not very much familiar with using a PMS and
writing documentations etc. Another challenge that arises was talking to clients over
the call and providing them instant solutions to their problems. So, it was mandatory
for every developer to have good communication skills, one should understand
clients requirements etc. So, decided to do 1 on 1 session with all employees and
share knowledge with them, doing scrum meetings with them to ensure they can
deliver and provide solutions to the clients easily.

5. Internal Communication also needs to be improved so that every employee should

take benefit of each other and utilize each others capabilities. So, it is highly
encouraged in Zonixsoft for any kind of problem we share with each other , look over
the internet or any other possible source to resolve clients concerns if any where
they get stuck. Its a regular practice in Zonixsoft. We also implemented Knowledge
sharing session where every week one employee will share something which he has
learnt new from the internet or any other source with the fellow employees. So, this
helps our team in increasing the technical skills and specially the junior resources
gets easily uplifted in the organization and provides a good amount of production as
per the targets.

6. With all the efforts, Zonixsoft able to earn good reputation in the market, funds
increased and invested in infrastructure to make sure their clients have ability to
review their work any point of time. Implemented in-house servers, testing
resources, offered good infrastructure to employees and well so that they can do
their work without losing any time and they feel comfortable in the office.

7. To maintain long term relations with the client, we follow up with them time to time
whether its good or bad and help them in every situation whatever best possible
from our side by offering reasonable costs to them and make sure its in their budget
and affordable for them without any compromise with Quality of the deliverables.
8. At Zonixsoft, We not only do work but celebrate birthday parties, annual day of
Zonixsoft and every year the company sponsors a FREE trip to all the employees and
have fun together. Its like a home at Zonixsoft and we celebrate every bit of
happiness together.

However, we are still trying to improve ourselves as much as possible. We believe

there is always a chance of improvement. We are looking forward to increase our
staff to 20-25 by 2017. Growth of the company is measured by its staff members not
by the turn over only. So, we are looking forward to keep on increasing the staff
moving forward.

I would like to end this story with a saying Individuals play the game, but teams beat
the odds

Thank you !