The high-tech sector needs to create abundance: In Time Tec can offer plenty

By Mauro Mereu

Since his childhood, Venkatesh Bachu’s mission statement has been “creating more with little”. In Time Tec’s motto is “creating abundance”. In a way, the two visions coincide. 

In Time Tec’s website About Us page defines the company as “a platform for Creating Abundance, and we just happen to build software.” The American-founded business offers customers all of its expertise to develop digital solutions to the problems they might be facing, tapping in from a wide array of options, including AI, cloud computing, and cyber security. 

Started by five founders in the United States in 2009 – with four of them being former Hewlett Packard (HP) employees – In Time Tec started global expansion last year. It launched branches in the Netherlands and in Korea, then started business in Dubai, Saudi Arabia, Australia, and Canada. Throughout the years, the company – whose four of the five founders came from has reached the $36 million revenue threshold, and HP has become its biggest customer since 2014. 

Venkatesh Bachu is the founder and managing director of In Time Tec Netherlands. Since getting a Master’s in Software Systems, he started working in the high-tech industry, with expertise in printing, semiconductor, and IoT domains. During his university days, Bachu interned at HP, getting in contact with Jeet Kumar, one of the five founders of In Time Tec.

More with little

Bachu’s mission statement comes from his Indian background. “I come from a proper middle-class family. In Dutch, we would say ‘Te groot voor een servet, te klein voor een tafellaken‘ – too big for a tissue and too small for a tablecloth, ed. We just had enough to live our life,” he recalls. 

At the age of fourteen, his father got involved in a major road accident. “He had to go through an operation that cost a lot of money. The logical choice was to let my older sister finish her education and for me to stop studying,” says Bachu. But then, thanks to the help of some friends, he could continue studying again, then enter university and finish his education at the age of 22. HP hired him as a software engineer, and in the Indian branch of the company, he developed himself, becoming the liaison between the software development and the manufacturing side of printing devices. 

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Taking care of the context around innovation

In 2017, Bachu moved to Eindhoven, and after some years working at Philips, he decided to offer his services by starting his own company. After succeeding on a few projects, he decided to take a step forward in his career, reaching out to Jeet Kumar for guidance and mentoring. In the years, the Bangalorean created a team with talent in India. Last year, In Time Tec Netherlands came to be in the form of a joint venture between the US company and Bachu, whose company and people now fall under the umbrella of the American company. 

“The focus is on creating solutions. For us, what matters is that we are solving the problem at the right quality, right time, and at the right budget. Deep-tech or high-tech companies want to focus on their innovation, and we make sure that everything around it is taken care of,” says Bachu, defining the purpose of his company. 

“When I talk to engineers in the region, they say, ‘I spend one day cracking that algorithm on paper, but to put it into software, I have to spend one month.’ You need to understand the nitty-gritty details of the language you are using,” he emphasizes. In a way, innovators should better spend their time working on their solution’s core and refining it further, rather than focusing on tasks that deduct time from working on their solution. To this extent, his company aims to help innovation strive faster, giving techpreneurs the abundance to create more.  

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Co-creation 

Rather than customers, Bachu prefers to call the companies In Time Tec works with partners. The chosen approach is one to become involved with the project, and help partners in every possible manner, not only from a software development standpoint. Also, the US-founded firm works with a 30/70 blended model, with thirty percent of the personnel close to the customers and seventy percent in India, as the company leverages cost and talent pool advantages. In fact, most of the global In Time Tec workforce is based in India – around 800 out of over a thousand global employees. And the formula has proven to work. 

Bachu: “I always say that it’s not about what we offer but about how we offer it. We start by asking what they want and look for the problem they and their customers have. At the same time, we start researching and trying to understand what’s going on. We identify the core problem and build the solution to make it happen.”

To such a degree, In Time Tec strives to offer as much guidance as possible, steering, if necessary, the whole creative process. “Maybe they come up with an idea for a native app, to then develop a progressive web app that is already solving their problems. This is how we create,” he stresses. To clarify, native apps are those commonly found on Google Play or App Store, while progressive ones can be accessed from any other browser. 

Abundance for the high-tech sector

The Dutch branch of In Time Tec centers its activities around high tech. As of today, five people are part of the staff, with the prospect of hiring twenty more by mid-2024. Bachu sees manufacturing and information technology domains coming closer to each other more and more. “The lines in between are slowly fading away. IT practices are entering the operational technology world,” he underlines. That’s where he sees the potential for the Brainport region and the whole country, too.  

This is the time to create abundance. “My mission is to create an ecosystem where software development is affordable to startups and becomes a development arm for scale-ups. That’s my definition of creating abundance,” Bachu concludes.