Gowri Shankar Subramanian is CEO, Aspire Systems, a firm that is into outsourced product development, providing complete product lifecycle services, ranging from new product development and product advancement to product migration, re-engineering, sustenance and support, to some of the world's most innovative independent software vendors and software-enabled businesses.

Gowri Shankar Subramanian, CEO, Aspire Systems

My dream for Aspire is to change the thinking of those aiming to build a product. Today, they are more prone to think that they need to hire technologists and set up an engineering team to build the product. I would like them to think that they should call Aspire to build the product! As a company that builds products for a living, we have an increasingly rich set of foundational frameworks and components that can greatly increase the speed at which the product can be built, and it can dramatically improve the quality of the product.

{quotes}Of course, to ensure this change in mindset, we have a lot of challenges to overcome, starting with educating customers that such a thing is in fact possible and not a utopian dream.{/quotes} However, I am sure that we, as an organisation, have what it takes to overcome such challenges.

So, do we want to stop with just building products for start-ups with ideas? Not by a long shot! That is a start. But why should this same principle not apply to Microsoft or Google, when they want to build a new product or extend an existing product? If this happens, you can then easily imagine that we are talking about a whole new way of building products. Hence, our vision to "transform product development".

To fully and truly achieve our vision, we need a very highly talented team with a lot of passion. It is not enough to just look in the market for such talent, since the supply of excellent people is extremely limited. So, it is imperative that we have a mechanism to identify, nurture and groom such talent within Aspire.

We recognise that achieving our dream is not just a two-three year journey; it is a journey of a decade or two. But we are working hard to realise this future state of Aspire as quickly as possible.