Bhupender Saharan – Founder and CEO, VVDN Technologies
Voice, Video, Data and Network (VVDN) is a concept-to-production company providing a broad spectrum of embedded design services and original design manufacturer (ODM) capabilities of automotive, industrial, networking, wireless, Internet of Things (IOT) and cameras. Founded in 2007, VVDN today is among the leading product engineering, cloud and manufacturing companies that is uniquely positioned to deliver versatile, innovative and world-class quality products. The company has a team size of more than 2000 engineers across nine design centres, four manufacturing plants in India and has a global presence across the US, Canada, Europe, South Korea and Japan. Our correspondent Vivek Singh Chauhan spoke to the Founder and CEO of VVDN Technologies, Bhupender Saharan, to understand the company’s long term vision, growth, expansion plans etc. Here’s the edited excerpt of the interaction.
What is the vision of your organization? VVDN Technologies was founded with a vision to build a product engineering company for doing end-to-end embedded product design and manufacturing. The company was founded in 2007 with a vision to be the premier ODM for Cloud Managed IOT Solutions. The objective was to bring global OEM’S to India for their electronic product design and deliver them the final products with manufacturing also happening in India.
How VVDN happened? The origin of VVDN was based out of the core idea and passion of its four founders who wanted India to become a design and manufacturing hub, rather than being known only for its software capabilities. Ever since our inception, we wanted to enable an eco-system of product engineering and manufacturing in India. We have been fairly successful in achieving our goal but would say that still, a lot needs to be done. We are optimistic and have always kept ourselves
flexible to adapt to the current technologies and trends. We hold a strong belief in the capabilities and expertise of the skillset present in the country.
Who are your targeted customers? What are the types of product the company manufactures? Our targeted customers are all global OEMS/ Smbs/start-ups working in the technology fields of IOT, camera, wireless and networking, automotive, industrial, defence across the operations of product engineering design, development, manufacturing, cloud application, infrastructure and support and other managed services. In these different business units mentioned above, VVDN is delivering products including Wi-fi Access Points, IOT and Artificial Intelligence (AI) cameras, IOT gateways, automotive dashcams, personal and logistics trackers, industrial tablets, thermal cameras and many others. All these devices connect to cloud for remote management and access over mobile apps. With cloud and mobile app expertise, VVDN is giving a new direction to the entire product engineering to provide complete solutions from hardware to firmware to mechanical to cloud
and apps — everything working together. Now VVDN is adopting next-generation digitization and bringing AI/ML, software automation and 5G into all the product designs.
Are you also planning to join hands with other tech giants to boost your business? We are very open to finding new ways and strategies when it comes to enabling the eco-system for solution development and manufacturing. We already have a strong collaboration with leading Silicon companies for product engineering, top cloud platform providers for cloud solution development, Napino Auto for manufacturing. VVDN believes that when all partners come together, only then we will be able to create an environment, which is conducive for innovation and technology.
How do you increase customer-centricity? As stated above, we bring our customers delight with our unique and unmatched value proposition to address their transformation and innovation needs all under one roof. VVDN’S commitment to “Solve for the Customer with Integrity” helps to keep the interest of our clients at the forefront. Our unparalleled domain expertise along with multi-disciplinary industry footprint and truly global nature enables us to deliver as per customer’s expectation. Also since we are a product engineering company, thus, most of our products and solutions are engineered according to the current market needs and challenges.
How much ‘Make in India’ is important these days? VVDN has had very strong emotions connected with bringing engineering and manufacturing business in India. We are all praise for the Indian government’s drive to encourage the “Design in India” and “Make in India” initiatives. It correlates to our dream of “Design and Make in India” when we started. Also, the custom and labour regulations have been eased to make it easy for manufacturers to produce goods in India. Therefore, it also has had a positive influence on Indian business. It has also helped in boosting the economy and also generated a lot of employment opportunities. However, there is still a long road ahead of us to be at par with the global manufacturing economies and am very positive that the government will address all the concerned parameters to further uplift the country in the global arena in the manufacturing sector.
What are your expansions plans, in India as well as globally? The expansion in India is aimed to be able to expand our team to cater to our customer’s requirement and increase our technical skill sets. Our global expansion goes with the ideology to collaborate more closely with our customers, in person and their local language. The US is our biggest target geography, however, we continue to look for expansions in Canada, Europe, and APAC as these regions are synonymous with being a technology powerhouse and a key hub of networking, IOT, camera, automotive and industrial space.
As a brand how much do you think you have evolved as compared to the past few years? VVDN’S journey has been quite terrific so far. Being in the technology space, it has been a steep learning curve however in the past decade, the company has witnessed unprecedented growth. We have continuously expanded our territories and kept to our promises of innovation, customer-centric approach and end-to-end service offering… Also, we have been able to reduce the turnaround time for our customers with our complete design to manufacturing capabilities in India. For some of our hardware, where we had to rely on China, we have now started manufacturing it in our new mechanical plant in Manesar. This cuts us the transit time from 6-8 weeks to mere 24-48 hours. Today, VVDN has got wider domain expertise, have got broader services offerings and have a stronger experience, which helps us to accelerate the development for our customers. It is a privilege to see that the company growing at a fast pace rate.
There are many other players in the industry. What makes you different? Our expertise in end-to-end product engineering including hardware, software, mechanical design, cloud/app development, and manufacturing is a key distinction. We are also the fastest to evolve as one of the leading ODMS in engineering, cloud and manufacturing in India, providing comprehensive cloudbased IOT solutions from concept to commission. We have an innovative team of experts working on latest IOT Technologies like voice integration, AI, cloud analysis and much more. ■
“The origin of
VVDN was based out of the core idea and passion of its four founders who wanted India to become a design and manufacturing hub, rather than being known only for its software capabilities”