Interview with Madhu V Swamy, Director and Co-Founder - Cumulations Technologies

Madhu V Swamy  

Director and Co-Founder, Cumulations Technologies

Give us a quick overview of Cumulations Technologies. When and how did you begin this journey and what were your motives to be successful in app development? 
We started Cumulations as a company where we built location-based mobile application products. Using this experience we started helping companies with their mobile apps as services. Due to our understanding of mobile space in its early days and successful delivery track, we started getting decent business. This helped us to grow organically.To be successful in the services business, one needs to work with clients who have a long term roadmap. For you to be part of that journey, you should be good with the delivery record and processes.

What is your role in the management and development of Cumulations Technologies?
The management team generally has multiple roles around Sales, Delivery, and Operations. I manage a few customer accounts as well.

Tell us about your biggest achievement in the industry
We were a few of the very first companies to build apps for IoT speakers, Solar power plant monitoring systems and OBD systems.

How do you schedule the development phases of the apps to promise the timeline to your clients?
We divide the project into multiple milestones. We follow Agile development methodology, where each milestone is further broken down to sprints. Customers are updated about each sprint and we will also keep them posted on delays or dependencies. At the end of each milestone, we provide them a delivery so that they can use the product and give us feedback.

How do you help your clients in choosing the right yet profitable platform for app development?
App development has mainly two approaches - Native and Platform independent. If we aren’t using a lot of hardware features, we recommend platform-independent techniques like Flutter.

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?
As per my previous answer, if the project doesn’t consume a lot of phone resources we could go with Hybrid apps. Also using native platform will ensure that we could leverage the platform capabilities to the fullest.

How do you scheme your pricing model? How do you fix your budget?
We fix the budget based on effort estimation. Screen designs would be an ideal input for effort estimates.

How helpful are the mobile apps developed by your team, for enhancing your clients’ business?
These apps are generally the front facing entities for their consumers. Hence they play a major role in the services offered by our customers.

What according to you are the best practices to attain client satisfaction?
Quality delivery is the most important factor. Hence, thorough testing before delivery and using the best development practices to make sure the product is scalable are a few important factors.

How do you update your business system to be in pace with the technological advancements?
We use the latest tools and methodologies most of the times to make sure that our team is working on the next generation stuff.

What are your thoughts about AR, VR, and the Internet of Things (IoT)? 
With the advent of a great number of IoT devices with AR and VR capabilities, this industry is going to grow. Mobile devices like the iPhone-XS have great AR capabilities which can be leveraged by app developers. However, it is not growing at a great pace. Ineffective Hardware, software partnerships could be the reason behind this.

What do you think will be the future of Mobile technology?
Mobile would remain the fastest growing consumer device segment in history for a few more years. With devices having more capabilities, hardware becoming cheaper I see this to be growing even more. The advent of ML and AI capabilities onto the mobile devices would dramatically shift the market. Thanks to powerful AI cameras. This is only going to grow.