Interview with Atman Rathod, Director and Co-founder - CMARIX

Give us a quick overview on CMARIX TechnoLabs. When and how did you begin this journey and what were your motives to be successful in app development?
Being a Technocrat with a versatile marketing background, a person with a complete customer-centric approach, and one with the passion of technological innovation I always had a vision of having a business that transforms businesses and provides advantages to others. In 2009, the vision soon transformed into reality with a team of 6.

What is your role in the management and development of CMARIX TechnoLabs?
I don’t confine myself to any specific role or designation. As a co-founder, my job is to ensure that my customers and my employees are very happy. This happens by ensuring qualitative work for our customers and providing an optimum work environment for our employees.

Tell us about your biggest achievement in the industry.
Apart from bagging several awards like shortlisted for Best Software Company of Gujarat 2018, CIO company of the year, Deloitte Fast 100 company of India & several others, our biggest achievement has been to work with Fortune 100 company of United States in Healthcare Industry to whom we provided a disruptive custom technology platform which is transforming the lives of people across the globe.
We started with the goal of creating a wow moment for our clients with our services. Moreover, today, when we look back and think of achievement, serving and working with 1100+ companies to achieve their software, web and mobile needs is one of the biggest achievement for us.

How do you schedule the development phases of the apps to promise the timeline to your clients?
The development phase for each client is planned on their customized needs. We initially understand the requirements and based on that ideas and research we work on the design, develop and launch goals.
Our execution is SCRUM based, whereby the project manager / SCRUM master defines detailed project backlog, outlines sprints and goes about execution with complete transparency to all the stakeholders. We provide regular code access to our customers and demo so they can review the work in progress and are thoroughly involved in the progress.

How do you help your clients in choosing the right yet profitable platform for app development?
It is quite a simple in fact. Our goal as a company is to make technology simple. We educate our customers with the difference between Native & Cross-Platform App Development. Based on the choice we provide different options of cross-platform frameworks available and help our customer make an informed decision.
For example, if someone is testing the market and looking at a low budget approach to see how the concept gets a reaction in the market, we recommend cross-platform app development. Whereas, if someone is looking to build a product and has sufficient funding we recommend a Native app development approach which is always better since it’s flexible, scalable and performance-centric.

Which would you suggest for a successful and profitable business progression, Native or hybrid apps? How do you define the factors that influenced you to make this choice?
When the talk is about mobile app development, any app whether native or hybrid can be beneficial to the specific industry or users. The selection of native or hybrid apps completely relies on client budget, business plan, and business requirements. We educate our customer about both approaches and ensure they make the right decision. For example, if a customer is looking for Augmented Reality (AR) based app, then Native app development is recommended. If the concept is a simple informative application than cross-platform is more cost effective & hence, recommended. This way the choice of technology depends on the concept, business planning, budget range& other factors.
Since, both the platforms are brilliantly established and each offers a unique set of benefits, the decision will always rely on complete and detailed analysis of the project idea.

How do you scheme your pricing model? How do you fix your budget?
We provide complete transparency to our customer in terms of pricing strategy. Our first goal is to understand the concept of the application based on which we define detailed project specifications. Once we have scope outlined, we provide a walkthrough of the scope to our customer based on which a detailed project proposal including technology stack, scope item, time and cost estimation is submitted.
We also understand that most projects have additional feature & functionality requirement while the work is in progress & requirements often change during the execution which is why we have a very flexible Change Request Management program to make it easier for our customers to manage the execution.

How helpful are the mobile apps developed by your team, for enhancing your clients’ business?
We are sharing a few of the recent success stories of mobile apps designed & developed by us:
●Glitty – It is a leading photo editing app ranking 1st in Spain for photo and video category.
●CoachShopr - An on-demand app that will help the busy-merchants or customers to communicate and order drivers to deliver the list. The client was really with our work shared the feedback on his social network regarding being the best team for delivering the project so quickly.

What according to you are the best practices to attain client satisfaction?
Following are key areas which we focus on specifically to ensure optimum client satisfaction:
1.Communication: We focus on understanding the WHY. By that, we mean the logic and motive behind any of client’s requirements & business needs. We put ourselves in their shoes and provide a proactive approach and execution plan to make their outsourcing process more efficient.
2.Giving: Our goal as a company is to contribute as much as we can to 2 of the most important entities which we serve. Our employees and our clients. Our focus has always been to give more to our customers than they expect in every aspect. For example, we provide recommendation document to several clients, coding standard documentation and several other technical insights which save them costing and brings more efficiency.
3.Execution: Key to client satisfaction is real execution. No matter how good the packaging is if the key product is not good customers won’t stick around for long. We take great pride in our strong execution methodology followed by the personalized relationship-oriented approach.

How do you update your business system to be in pace with the technological advancements?
This has been a challenge for us since our culture is to lead the technology revolution and adopt the latest technology & best practices way before other people have heard its name.
For example, we have been early adopters of Angular in Western India. We have been among the few companies in India, who have worked upon enhanced face detection video system based on caffe libraries of MIT. Key to our success is almost 15% of our manpower is constantly involved in R&D for newer & better ways of getting things done.
We are very active in terms of tapping global markets, experimenting new things and taking risks which brings about a sharp edge helping us leading the technology race.

What are your thoughts about AR, VR, and the Internet of Things (IoT)?
We demonstrated a prototype of a successful IoT product during our exhibition in Mobile World Congress Barcelona - 2013. We have implemented several concepts with Augmented Reality. In fact, we have been implementing a lot of 3D content creation as this market is growing very fast in the United States. We have worked with Virtual Reality giants like Surivios LLC in the US with their award-winning game Raw Data.
We are very positive about these technologies and are working on several disruptive startups which will hit the market later in 2019.

What do you think will be the future of Mobile technology?
The future of mobile technology cannot be thought without automation and innovations getting more smart and eye-appealing. The businesses will be able to interact, process and work with their clientele in a more versatile way. If we consider the current usage of mobile and mobile apps, we can guarantee a sudden surge of mobile use in the upcoming year.
If mobile apps are developed with the right mobile team that adds required technicality and looks to the app, then the day is not far away when all the desktop apps will be replaced with mobile apps.