Unleashing the Opportunity of Mobile Applications Development Among Indian 'Brainy' Developers: JetBrains

India has a large developer community which is heavily focused on mobile development. Organizations like JetBrains, see India as an important market with a rising interest in Kotlin. “We want to focus on supporting Indian developers and aiming at increasing and building stronger ties. India is a fast-growing market, so far the largest markets are USA and Europe, we are expecting India to grow in future, and want to be ready,” this was commented by Javed Mohamed, Country Head -  India, JetBrains in an exclusive interaction with Faiz Askari, Founder Editor of SMEStreet.

Here are detailed excerpts of the interaction

Faiz Askari: How does JetBrains view the developer community in India?

Javed Mohamed: There is a lot of innovation that is taking place in the developer space in India. There is a misconception harboured by people that Indian developers do not have created and can only execute projects given to them, this fact is based on prejudices influenced by the idea that India is basically a place where projects are outsourced but this is far from the truth. Indian developers have a huge role to play in digital transformation and are not often given credit they deserve. Applications that are used globally are created, developed and designed in India. With our tools, software developers are able to focus on the task.  JetBrains helps developers to develop code that is more intelligent. The key is to help developers eliminate code related errors.

Faiz Askari: How many JetBrains products are currently available in India?

Javed Mohamed: JetBrains has a presence in India for many years now. We sell all our products globally and all the products on offer are available in India. We do not have to custom design our resources for India that we have to take up in other countries. Annually, our IDE platform is downloaded a million times in India itself.

Faiz Askari: What are your expectations from the Indian market?

Javed Mohamed: India has a large developer community which is heavily focused on mobile development. We see India as an important market for us with a rising interest in Kotlin. We did roadshows in Pune, Bengaluru and Chennai in collaboration with local communities and users to engage and get closer to the Indian developers' community. We want to focus on supporting Indian developers and aiming at increasing and building stronger ties. India is a fast-growing market, so far the largest markets are USA and Europe, we are expecting India to grow in future, and want to be ready. We have been in an expansion mode in cities across Europe and the US for the past seven years. Since 2016, we started expanding into Asia, starting with China, Japan, South Korea, and India. We have a growing base of users in India despite not having an active presence in India. The expansion program will help us know our Indian customers better than we have in the past. The growing number of startups in India is a positive for us as we are looking to enable them with our tools offering an incentive of 50% discount on all our products for startups.

Faiz Askari: Please talk about the business model of your organization.

Javed Mohamed: Most of our business has been through word of mouth, we have not engaged in active marketing activities until now as we have always followed a bottom-up approach. Developers who have used our products often recommend it to fellow developers as our tools help them work faster by automating the repetitive tasks and enabling them to stay focused on code design.

We have a very small sales force of 30 people worldwide out of 800 employees. Most of our workforce are developers, including our CEO Maxim Shafirov who still codes.

We are a niche player with strong products like IntelliJ IDEA that is successfully competing even with free version of other products.

Our focus is to support the developer community in the best way possible not only with our subscription-based tools like IntelliJ, ReSharper, PyCharm, PhpStorm, etc., but also with our free community edition and free student license.

Faiz Askari: Does JetBrains have or is planning to partner with SMEs?

Javed Mohamed: We intend to support the developers in SME sector and build stronger ties. We are working with 4 SME partners in India – Preflex Solutions, DevTools, Logon Software and Amrut Software. We plan to add few more strategic business partners, who would promote and create awareness of JetBrains products among SMEs. JetBrains will provide training, technical and marketing support to the partners.

Faiz Askari: How are you integrating emerging technologies into your products?

Javed Mohamed: Emerging technologies have been incorporated to understand user behaviour and to refine its tools accordingly. By way of doing this, we want to understand what kind of codes developers want to write and try to make them aware of possible bugs and security loopholes beforehand. We analyze code bases, when a developer is writing code, thereby effectively detecting issues with a code if there are any. The deep intelligence in our tools will have the knowledge of the type of project and use that knowledge to help enhance a complete project. For better completion and analysis of a code, we are investing in machine learning. Tools like Datalore are catering to the demand for machine learning and data science which has seen a spike in interest. We are the creator of brand new programing language Kotlin, a statically typed programming language for modern multiplatform applications. It is is a very flexible language, both object-oriented and functional with an easy-to-use and easy-to-learn semantic, which offers an interesting alternative to Java.

Faiz Askari:  What are the key trends in technology adoption among SMEs?

Javed Mohamed: Growing interest among developers towards artificial intelligence, machine learning and Block Chain has led JetBrains to enable their interest with efficient tools. We don´t have directly solution for Block Chain, artificial intelligence or machine learning. However, there are third-party plug-ins for JetBrains tools which are designed to support. The plug-in market is one thing JetBrains has been working on to build a strong ecosystem for our tools. JetBrains' always had an effort on building developer ecosystem and supporting developers needs by automating routine checks and corrections, our tools speed up production, freeing developers to grow, discover and create. In this case, we are more of an enabler then producer.