Digital Personae-->All about Oblix,Inc-->A company to watch.
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Meet the Founders.(Sandeed,Mulchandani & Kumar)
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Eubanks on Oblix
'....."I don't know if Oblix needs instant clout," he says. "They're a first mover in what will be a huge area. What I bring to the table is a lot of experience in building a company from $0 to $600 million." ...
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Digital Personas Take Over the Corporate Identity
Three entrepreneurs see the Internet revolution morphing into an intranet revolution. This brought to life Oblix, a well-funded Silicon Valley startup that is going places within corporations.
Sandeep Johri, foresaw some of the changes sweeping the corporate information infrastructure marketplace while working with Ed McCracken at Silicon Graphics. Johri, now President and CEO of Oblix, assisted McCracken in his responsibilities as co-chair of the United States Advisory Council on the National Information Infrastructure (NII). He predicted that the intranet technology would trigger a new platform, requiring an entirely new set of applications. But what would be these new applications?
The obstacle to finding an easy solution was confounded by the fact that customers did not know what they wanted. The market was ill-defined, and there were no pricing models or established technology to build the new applications. The market and technology risks were inherent obstacles. Johri knew he had a powerful idea – although a bit fuzzy – but one that would require an experienced team to develop and execute. Johri spread the word, and before long he was referred to Kumar Vora and Nand Mulchandani. The three would meet after-hours and on weekends in a friend's borrowed conference room. “There were frustrating times when we didn't know what idea would pan out,” remembers Mulchandani. In three months they had flushed out numerous ideas, and by April 1996, had decided to make the big plunge to form Oblix.
Oblix's initial funds from angel investors in New York were enough to last them for the first six months working out of a small office in Cupertino. Mulchandani was the first to leave his “day” job at Sun. Johri still giggles at the thought of Mulchandani's nervous words: “I left my job today, man! You're not going to leave me high and dry, are you?”
Starting Oblix
Without any experience of having managed an office, the three found themselves involved in tasks ranging from buying furniture from dubious sources to ordering telephone lines to recruiting their first employee in an extremely competitive market. The three initially shared a modem — a tough ride for the trio accustomed to T1 lines. Initially, Johri managed the business side and Vora and Mulchandani managed the development side. By October of the same year, they had hired five additional programmers and a VP of marketing. At the time Oblix was growing at breakneck speeds, the Silicon Valley job market had scarce resources available.
So Johri and gang cast the net wider. They recruited a reporter from Pennsylvania as their Webmaster. Jim Beno, an avid Deadhead, not only designed the Oblix Web site, but soon took over press releases and market collateral design. Johri is a believer in multi—tasking: when Oblix was starting out, everyone did everything.
Customers are Key
Early customers, like 3Com, provided Oblix the leverage they needed to legitimize the market category and garner venture interest. 3Com not only provided validation but also a feedback loop for feature and product ideas. “We started off as an out-of-the box solution. As our customers matured, we were able to focus on areas where we could find longer-term value,” comments Mulchandani.
Oblix's first critical break came from Netscape Communications Corp. As one of the first enterprise applications running on Netscape servers, Oblix was a natural partner and garnered credibility from the Netscape name. In late 1997, Oblix released IntraPower Suite, which allowed customers to publish and manage information in directories across the enterprise. Within the first four months of product availability, Oblix became the first company to ship an LDAP—based application for 3D Systems, CSX, DHL, Hitachi, Kinkos, LSI Logic, NASA and Sun Microsystems.
Fundraising Begins…
To succeed in Silicon Valley, Johri knew they needed the best venture capitalists backing them as possible. By including a Java-based front-end in the product, Oblix peaked the interest of The Java Fund of the Venture Capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. To win the heart and money of the VCs, the Oblix team had to convince them of a new category of products: Corporate Services Automation (CSA). In December of 1997, Kleiner Perkins invested $3 million in Oblix.
Oblix benefited tremendously from the Kleiner Perkins' kieretsu – the network of companies funded by the VC firm. With Netscape at the center, these companies were building applications for this new infrastructure. “We have developed partnerships with the key directory server vendors including Netscape, Novell and Microsoft since our solution can help them more effectively deploy their directory infrastructures and extend the information in their directories to other applications and people throughout the enterprise,” says Johri.
“As we automate more of the corporate services in our customers' environments, there are critical linkages that must be established with other companies.” Sun Microsystems and Sun JavaSoft similarly provide a strategic partnership for Oblix. For example, the new hiring process needs to be tightly linked with the human resources system to minimize duplicate efforts and speed up the implementation process. Oblix is working with major human resource systems providers such as PeopleSoft to create those linkages.
In addition, providing consulting and integration services will become a larger part of the total solution.
Product Metamorphosis
In August of 1998, Oblix introduced a major upgrade to IntraPower Suite: the CSA Solution. Services such as human resources, telecommunications, sales and legal all fall within the realm of Oblix's CSA solution. The Oblix solution addresses the problems faced by IS departments in the midst of rapid corporate change: providing services to a fluid workforce, responding to an endless line of requests and coping with escalating data management costs. Leveraging existing or planned intranet infrastructure investments, Oblix software allows companies to unify and manage the employee information and services that previously resided in multiple departmental databases.
The Oblix Corporate Service Center is a one-stop interface for managing all of the information and services associated with each employee by creating a Digital Persona. A Digital Persona is a complete digital profile of an employee that can be used to provision and track valuable corporate resources and information such as mobile phones, computer equipment, security and e-mail access, as well as security access to home-grown corporate applications.
Growth
In December of 1998, Oblix announced a Series C funding round of $10.6 million led by Patricof & Co. Ventures, Inc. and includes new investments by Netscape and Novell, and a follow-on investment from original investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Today, Oblix has mushroomed into a 48-employee team with an impressive list of billion-dollar customers, including Knight Ridder, 3Com, Hitachi and Parsons.
According to Johri, “we are the killer app on top of directories.” Although Oblix is mostly focused on large corporations today, its future plans include expanding into the mid-size companies market. The future growth of Oblix hinges on maintaining the culture and work ethic, a focused and driven team, and responsiveness to customers that has found Oblix its early successes.
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(Vijaylaxmi Chawla works at NETBORHOOD.com, an Internet services company that provides Web-based customer care solutions to large enterprises. Prior to founding NETBORHOOD, Vijay was at Robertson Stephen's Equity Research group. She is a graduate of UC Berkeley and Stanford.)
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