For iTech US, Mobile Ambitions Became Too Much for One Firm

Dallas — When it came time to maneuver his technology consulting firm deep into yet another realm of IT development, iTech US CEO Kishore Khandavalli repeated the steps that he had taken multiple times before.

First, he gathered critical research. Second, he made some informed bets as to what types of services his customers would likely want to buy.

“We said that in the next 24 months, we see that mobility is coming, we see that big data is coming, so let’s focus on our existing people and employees and let’s update their skills related to those technologies,” says Khandavalli, whose mix of methodology and instinct led iTech US into the corridors of such coveted customers as Pepsi, IBM, DIRECTV, eBay, and Microsoft.

“I have to know the pulse of the industry. This way, I’m ahead of the curve and we have the right talent for the opportunity,” he explains.

However, only three months after establishing iTech’s latest division, Khandavalli had begun viewing the division dubbed simply “mobile apps” in a new and different light.

“In hindsight things are always easier to see, and this is clearly a different line of business today,” explains Khandavalli, who decided to spin off the firm’s mobile app division into a stand-alone company that would later be named Seven Tablets.

“What I saw was that when it came to the evolution of mobility, inside the corporate world no one was really clear as far as how to leverage and adapt the phenomenon into their business,” remarks Khandavalli, who says that upon greater reflection, the opportunity that came into focus was the need for a solution that would allow a company to empower its mobile apps so that they can be used by all devices.

“We saw which way the industry was headed, and I wanted to be there when corporate enterprise mobility really takes off,” explains Khandavalli, who says that what he foresaw is today known in mobile tech circles as bring your own device, or BYOD.

“When a company adopts a BYOD strategy, the firm’s applications must think as one software, and this requires a single source code that sits on the platform,” he explains.

Today, Khandavalli is CEO of both a start-up — Seven Tablets of Dallas, Texas — and iTech, which has grown into an $80 million middle-market firm.

“Seven Tablets takes a lot more investment, and it involves a lot more strategy,” says Khandavalli, when asked why he felt it necessary to have Seven Tablets be established as a separate firm. Unlike the consulting business he largely built using the trusted model of time and materials, Khandavalli says that Seven Tablets requires a significant investment in intellectual property in light of it having “a lot more reusable code and a broader library of tools.”

“We are taking much more of a modular approach, so when a company wants an app and wants it within the next 60 days, we can deliver a solution a lot more quickly than our competition and at the same time do it at less cost,” explains Khandavalli, who repeats his original insight one last time: “The idea that a company would limit its applications to a single device was just not practical.”