An Indian Product Company

Sramana Mitra, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur with her own blog, writes a Forbes.com column.

Her latest Forbes column is on Sridhar Vembu, founder and CEO of AdventNet.

His company created a low cost, on-line productivity suite called Zoho. It has the functionality of Microsoft Office combined with Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

Zoho severely undercuts the pricing of SalesForce.com's offerings.

Mitra describes how Vembu's frugality allowed him to build AdventNet without debt or venture capital. This allowed Vembu to reject a buy-out offer from SalesForce.com.

She argues that AdventNet is one of the few software "product" companies in India.

She defines a product company as one that makes a software product once and then resells it multiple times to multiple customers.

This has leverage when compared to the typical Indian software "services" companies, which do customer-specific development. They need to keep plugging bodies in.