Ace Infoway

Ace Infoway is not your regular software services company if I may say so. We are partners from ideas to implementation for brands looking to constantly remain mainstream in their technological advancements, be it; Web, Mobile, Product Engineering, eCommerce, Machine Learning, and MarTech.

Digital/Tech Agencies & Webpreneurs are our primary clients wherein we offer unique solutions to unique problems. We are a strong team of 300+ techies and marketers built over 21 years of experience, and we’ve still managed to retain our start-up culture at the core of what we do.

I work as a CEO for this team, I will have to lay emphasis on the fact that I am not your regular ‘CEO of a Software firm’. My primary role is not to interfere with my team in their work. I trust to have built a team that is most capable of the roles they’re assigned, and my intervention should not have them doubt their capabilities. Moreover, I might also allow them to make a wrong decision rather than having no decision at all, and that has been our secret sauce to growth and success. My job is to ensure that this ideology percolates down to the last individual in our organizational structure.

In nutshell, I function as Chief Enabling Officer to empower my team to scale new heights professionally & personally.

Our story dates back to 1997 when I sat my foot in Ace Group which was primarily a BPO company. As a business-novice but Internet-Geek, I took up an assignment of setting up a web/software development division which was named PLANETACE. It started with a team of 2 members offering a web design service.

Our first pitch was “We are from the Internet and we can create a webpage for your business”. Now as hilarious as it may sound but it worked then. Next, we sent mailers to US companies with some unconventional and off-beat sales pitches. Slowly and gradually, we learned the ropes and today we stand as a solutions partner to more than 100+ Agencies.

One important practice that we followed was to continuously keep ourselves in trend and investing in new initiatives. In the last few years, we have had a major shift towards our growth strategy and in place of traditional business growth strategies, we identify an opportunity and launch with a quick go-to-market strategy. We give 6 to 12 months of the incubation period to allow it to become an independent unit. So far, we have got our 3 most successful start-ups into eCommerce, AEC (Architectural, Engineering & Construction), and Digital Marketing space within the umbrella of our group.

In terms of our business model - almost 70-80% of our structure is in-house talent, and the rest is to leverage expertise based on outsourcing. The reason being, it’s impossible, and often impractical to try and reach out on every front by yourself. Since we’re living in a time and age where collaborating is the only way forward, in order to be able to deliver optimally to our clients - we like to capitalize on the viewpoints and talent of outside sources, whenever we see the need for it.

We are also shifting our focus from primarily a “service company” to a “solutions partner”. We work with Tech/Digital agencies, Webpreneurs, and small to midsize businesses, offering them Apps, SaaS solutions & technology services in mainly four areas i.e., Web/Software development, E-commerce, Digital Marketing, and CAD/Architectural services.

Our people and Our culture – these two sets us apart from competition and the rest is what we are good at, naturally. We foster strong bonds with our people who then extend those bonds with our clients.
 

The most important page on our website is not the ‘About us’ page or the Services page, its “Life @Ace” page. We get this a lot from prospects and clients that “Yours seems to be a very Happy team” and that is what we consider as an achievement and what is distinct for our organization.
 

What’s in it for our clients?
Well, apart from this as I mentioned we are not just outsourcing partners but ideas to implementation partners. Our team goes the extra length to provide creative solutions to our clients by deep investigative analysis of requirements as well as planning smooth and timely deliveries. A happy workforce combined with an obsession for client success is the deeply ingrained values in our team. This culminates into happy clients who get the same degree of enthusiasm and ownership of work, as them, when they associate with us.

Our industry focus is Publishing, FinTech, Telecom, Promo Products, eCommerce, AEC, NGOs, Marketing & Advertising. Our overall client retention rate averages out to 93% if we consider all niches.

With some of our clients, we encountered complete ownership/management restructuring (at their end) not once but multiple times. Usually, such displacements have implications on 3rd party partners, however, our partnership remained rock solid throughout all those transitions. And this says a lot, personally to me, of how my team works hand in hand with our clients and builds long-term relationships.

Our services are divided into four main categories –

93% of retention rate with an average customer life cycle of 5 years.
We take a deep dive to understand the overall business of our clients which includes the services/solutions they provide, target market & audience, current processes which help us get to the root pain point/problem they are looking to solve. We make sure we offer the most optimal solution for our customers - in terms of technology, longevity, and cost and not just try to sell.

Our solutions provide the most value for money in given circumstances and also have the capacity to scale/evolve over time. We fully understand that technology and customer business needs to keep on evolving, so we make sure that our team is well versed and adapts the latest technology and optimal practices which can ultimately prove to bring maximum profitability to our customers.

And lastly, a team that is customer-committed rather than only customer-focused.

We have deployed a robust in-house customer support system that is monitored 24x7 and guarantees a response time of 6 hours to our customers/partners.

The system is completely automated however closely tracked by project coordinators. Every issue or query is prioritized based on its importance and urgency and immediately assigned for a resolution. To avoid that nothing falls through the crack an escalation mechanism is in place which raises a flag if a query is not resolved/responded to within 24 hours.

We strongly believe that easy access to the team & constant communication is the key for client retention. For our client stakeholders, there is always one central point of contact available for all queries & communications. We follow a process to constantly keep our customers in the loop on the progress of our undertakings with them, and also if we see any impending roadblocks.

Our payment structure is variable, based on each of our divisions:

We have seen that most of the time relationships start with a pilot engagement or a small project, so we are flexible to start small and then help customers scale up fast. Typically, once the relationship is established, our budget preferences are as below:

The minimum price range that we’ve catered to has started from $2000 and gone up to $100,000.

10 years in the field of technology is like a century or even a millennium with the speed it is changing and growing. One thing for sure is we will see ourselves younger in the next 10 years. Nurturing and developing talent will remain our foremost objective.

We envision continuing with our innovation mindset. That is something which will keep us current & relevant. And a lot of it depends on keeping our start-up culture intact.

Our aim is to amplify, accelerate and invest in new initiatives to triple up on our growth rates in the next 10 years. I see Ace Infoway becoming an authority in the global tech community by leveraging our learnings from all these years in distinct niches/technologies.