I had the pleasure of meeting with Amit Shah, Partner & CEO of Incipient Corp. Incipient Corp is a full service software development group located in Rutherford, NJ.
About Incipient Corp
The company started with an untraditional path. Typically, when people start a business, they go through a process of raising funds and using their network to get their business off the ground. Incipient Corp took a unique approach early on by focusing on the R&D for themselves. Given that the company is a transactional type of business and a service-based operation, they were fortunate to be able to do that. As a result, they gained the insight and empathy of what it feels like to be a customer working with a software group. This helped them elevate the product development experience into every project they undertake.
The company started in 2010, Amit’s sophomore year in high school. The first big milestone was finally defining the mission and focus and the types of people they wanted to work with. The second milestone was where they become laser focused on their customer profile. This meant being very comfortable and looking forward to the growth that comes with knowing your customers.
Currently the company has 25-35 employees and a massive month over month growth of adding more. The Rutherford area has about 10-15 employees while the rest are located in the company’s offshore office in India which is fully owned by Incipient Corp.
To date (from the time the company focused on software development) the company has completed over 300-350 projects, covering a wide range of different technologies and databases as well as enterprise-based technologies. We care deeply on how our customers leverage iOT / AI / ML because these technologies enable operations and such technologies cannot be as fruitful as individual contributors. People often think “AI can solve these problems”…. however, people should be asking “how can we integrate AI into our operations and technologies”.
A huge part of the company’s success has been its ability to focus on doing the best work possible – regardless of the technology, solution or platform. Incipient Corp does a great job of introducing the mechanical aspect of software development and bridging that with the aesthetics, simplicity and the end user look and feel of the application that’s part of product development. Product development is the ability to understand the requirements and build meaningful software. Software development brings the traditional process of defining requirements, building software specifications and functional aspects along with validating the formats of storing data, architecture and mapping. Bringing these two facets – product development and software development – and merging them effectively is something Incipient Corp does really well. This is what digital transformation means to them.
The flipside to this includes some challenges. According to Amit, the same challenge remains – customers want to adopt new technologies really fast. For example, Incipient Corp is working with startup’s and SME communities as this is their sweet spot and most importantly taking an agnostic view to our customers helps not only bring preexisting imagination to the table and most importantly allows us to leverage the right tools to solve objectives vs. using the same tools because of preexisting experience.
In both cases, the customer wants to incorporate and define an AI initiative of implementation into their products. Amit, though, suggests a roadmap of plan of when the right time to do this even thought they are very eager, and they have money to get this started. Although it’s encouraging that people want to use new technology, once Amit explains the thought process and strategy to the planning and how to approach incorporating AI and other cognitive technologies, people start to understand and get a clear picture as well.
Every customer is different and based on Incipient Corp’s experience, they have an entire tool chest built and can identify which tools are appropriate to the customer based on their scenario. The process starts by identifying the customer goals and determining whether they need help with the initiative planning phase where they go through the requirements and document all of the functional and architectural specifics of the whole project. Once that has been completed, the project goes through an agile product development process, delivery path and implementation structure, etc. After the product development has been completed, many customers need a support and maintenance plan. Incipient Corp provides end to end support post development.
What’s next
Amit wants to focus on adapting the cognitive technologies. The company is fortunate to have great talent on the team of people who not only understand cognitive technologies really well, but people who have implemented the technology from very large implementations and perspectives. Amit also believes that through their expertise from software development and product development perspectives, they can begin to work with a lot of different types of organizations on digital transformation initiatives.
In 2021, Amit wants to triple the company’s growth and help customers understand their strategic goals and objectives for the next few years.
What a great conversation! Amit is looking forward to attending the SaaStock EMEA event in October 2020.
For more information, please go to https://incipientcorp.com/
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