We need more such success stories from India, this is really a great innovation - because this is first of it's

kind in the world and the Phanindra Sama, Charan Padmaraju and Sudhakar Pasupunuri all the three founders have made us proud by innovating the ingenious product, a country can achieve greater heights only when it is able to innovate products of it's own not coping or following others innovation and trends...

Business magazine Fast Company recently released its 2012 list of the World's 50 most innovative companies. One of the companies to

be featured on the list is the Bangalore-based redBus, an online bus ticketing company. redBus was founded by Phanindra Sama, Charan Padmaraju and Sudhakar Pasupunuri. All the three founders were friends from BITS, Pillani. In this exclusive interview with rediff.com, the ever-smiling Phanindra Sama, CEO of redBus talks about the company's journey and its achievements.

On being selected as one of the world's 50 most innovative companies Not even in our wildest dreams, did we ever imagine that we would be chosen as one of the world's 50 most innovative companies in the world. This recognition has given the team whole new inspiration to work a lot harder. The team from Fast Company had been talking to us about what we do for almost a month. When they asked about the innovation aspect of redBus, I said it was not actually a big innovation; it's not like a discovery. I saw a problem, and being an engineer, I went ahead and solved the problem. When we decided to go ahead with the venture, we faced many questions, like there were hundreds of bus operators who were not exactly literate and how we were going to make them computer literate.

Many dissuaded us by saying it was not possible and why we wanted to get into such an area, why would people book bus ticket on the Internet, and so on. Another question that we faced was, how much money would we make from a bus ticket that costs around Rs 500?

Using open source technology

Some of these questions made us think and that's when we decided on open source technology. Right from the call centre we use only open source. We have seven call centres in the country and when we were setting them up, many told us we had to buy software and it would cost lot of money. But, then there was no other option. It was critical for us to be in all these places. Thus, we looked around and came across this software called Asterisk which is an open source software for telephony. Because it was open source, we downloaded it and it worked! Like any start-up, we faced criticism, and many condemned us for 'our ignorance'. Even then, we pursued it. Today, all our call centres are working fine. In fact, now industry players say, 'if redBus uses it, that means it works!' Like Fast Company said, "redBus has an

innovative way of doing business. Innovation means doing the right thing and not doing an unknown thing." On Cloud Platform "All our IT infrastructure and servers are on the cloud platform. We moved to the cloud three years ago, when hardly anyone in India was doing that. Compared to those who moved bit by bit, we moved to cloud 100 per cent. All our 90 servers are on the cloud. Moving to the cloud platform was one of the innovative practices we did when it was not popular. It was very critical for our business that we moved to the cloud as it gave us around 40 per cent saving in cost. This gave our business sustainability.

Another successful idea Usually, a travel agent gets more commission if he sells more tickets. Somehow, we at redBus felt this business model is not sustainable as the agent may become a parasite on the seller. Though the whole world follows the model, we decided not to follow it. We decided irrespective of the volumes we do, whether it be 100 tickets or 1,000 tickets, our commission would remain the same. If we try to squeeze more commission from them, the operators make no money.

This idea gave a lot of comfort to the bus operators and increased their confidence in us. We have been following this from the time we started functioning. This, we feel, is an out of the box kind of business model.

Dealing with customers When rediff.com first wrote about us, there were many irate customers on the message board, but we tried to find solutions to each and every complaint. We are certain, there will be less complaints this time. We are learning every day.

Much of our operations are set in place now.

Journey so far... Year-on-year, we have grown three times and it is a big number. And, with hard work, we are discovering better and better things each day. When we made the first business plan, our ambition was to have a turnover of Rs 1 crore (Rs 10 million). That was a big number for us. But, we got our encouragement from this reality show Kaun Banega Crorepati. The prize money that was offered on the show was Rs 1 crore. We thought it was a magical figure, and we felt that if ever our company made Rs 1 crore turnover, we would have achieved something. In the first year, our turnover was Rs 50 lakh! But in the second year, we made Rs 5 crore (Rs

50 million). Then, we wanted to cross the magic figure of Rs 100 crore (Rs 1 billion) and last year, we did that. Now, we aim to cross about Rs 300-330 crore (Rs 3 to 3.3 billion). This year, we would have sold tickets to 5 million customers and we have tied up with 700 bus operators. Even our employee strength has gone up from 200 to 500 in the last one year. For me, I am the same person, the same CEO, and the only difference is that I now have to learn to manage 500 people. This is our journey, and it has been fantastic so far. It was one of discovery and lot of learning. It was a journey of excitement and disappointment. The high points of the journey There are quite a few high points in this journey

so far. Being named as one of the world's top 50 most innovative companies is a high point. When the MD of the Government of Goa Transport Corporation in a press release said "That four months after tying up with redBus, for the first time, their inter-state routes became profitable, it was another high-point. Indeed, that was a very fulfilling compliment. We were so happy that we could make a difference." Some mails like the one saying, that he would not have attended the interview if not for redBus, are also very satisfying. It is very inspirational and motivational for us when people say that this kind of a business model is not present anywhere in the world. I believe from this idea, a lot more impact can be derived in a vast country like India. It can also be replicated in other countries. Thus, I feel

that we have to focus on this idea and work harder. I also believe that if you do one good job, your life is worth it. But, the important thing is, whatever you do, do it well. http://www.rediff.com/business/slide...t/201202 22.htm Last edited by Tamil Arasan; 22-02-12 at 01:52 PM. peacecracker, LurkerBaba and Mad Indian like this. Reply 22-02-12, 09:32 PM #2 Tamil Arasan

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Location Dubai Posts 115 Follows 0 Following 0 Likes 146 It's sad that the above news have not attracted any comments from our forum members, but on the other hand if I would have reported any news about Rakhi Sawant or any celebrity then many must have been interested to discuss on that topic.... Same goes with our media, they hardly give importance to any positive news from our country on the other hand will report page after page of information for a film release or on any negative news, some time back I read an article

written by our former president APJ Kalam regarding our media and Israel media, once he went to Israel on a state visit and the time he landed in Tel Aviv airport they had a massive bomb blast near the airport and many dead and injured, then later next day morning when Dr.Kalam saw the paper he saw the front page completely filled with an excellent news about a Israeli former who made hundreds of acres of barren land equal to gold mines yielding excellent crop out put, he made that possible because of his handwork and dedication, and then finally he was able to trace a small portion allotted for the news about the bomb blast deep inside the paper. I am not against our media reporting truth, yes they have to report every news be it positive or negative - but what is happening with Indian media is total contrast to the Israel media, example - India must have successfully launched a satellite to orbit, and you will not find that news in front page but rather you will

see some photos of filthy politicians or news about rape, or news about murder related to illicit relationship, or news about the cinema actors or even news about our over paid IPL cricketer and their affairs... Every day so many positive news are happening around India, but very rarely people are aware of it - below news is one such example reported by BBC news, which says "Innovation hotspot grows in Bangalore" BBC News - Innovation hotspot grows in Bangalore

Getting on the Big Data bus When it comes to finding patterns in large data sets quickly, creating new analytics products and building business analysis tools, Farber said businesses also have access to tools such as Google BigQuery. Farber points to an online travel agency in India, redBus, that made use of BigQuery to introduce Internet bus ticketing that unified tens of thousands of bus schedules into a single booking system. They then crunch terabytes of booking and inventory data so they can give a full picture of what is happening with buses in India in seconds, he said. Were looking forward to putting this kind of computing power in more peoples hands.

RedBus Receives $6.5M In Series C Round Led By Helion Ventures May 16, 2011 | Preethi J

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Update: Pilani Soft Labs has issued a media statement announcing it has raised $6.5 million in its Series-C funding. The funds will be used to expand its footprint and reach in its current markets.

redBus has crossed 3.5 million tickets and has registered Rs. 120 crores in gross bookings. In the media statement, Phanindra Sama, CEO and co-founder, redBus, said, Its highly motivating for us to get backed by all our three existing investors. At this stage of our journey, our business is strengthened by the network effect. Its encouraging for us to see government participation on our platform. Recently the Goa Government Transport Corporation adopted our technology. With the latest fund raised we plan to strengthen our capacity to serve the increasing business. Charan Padmaraju, CTO and Co-founderredBus, added that the company is an early adopter of of cloud computing and that all its servers are on the cloud. While the bus market is attractive, the quality of the team is even more compelling. They have solved a hard problem grounds up, institutionalized a culture that engenders ethics

alongside success, and have achieved scale in a fragmented space, said Ashish Gupta, Partner, Helion Venture. Original Post (May 13, 18:16): Shortly after reaching the milestone of selling 3 million tickets, Pilani Soft Labs Pvt Ltd, which runs the bus ticketing site redBus.in, has raised $6 million from Helion Venture Partners, Inventus Capital Partners and Seedfund. StartupCentral reported the deal first. This is the third round of funding received by the five-year-old company. Earlier, it had raised $1 million in its angel round from Seedfund and an undisclosed sum from Inventus Capital Partners and Seedfund in July, 2009. The current round was led by Helion Venture Partners, with Inventus and Seedfund participating. However, Helion remains the largest shareholder, Anand Lunia, executive director of Seedfund, told Techcircle.in.

Interestingly, Helion is a major investor in Nasdaq-listed online travel company MakeMyTrip, which owns bus ticketing site Ticketvala.in. However, Ticketvala is not a significant revenue contributor to MMT today. MMT also had a strategic partnership with Redbus before acquiring Ticketvala. Helion has previously backed Internet companies such as ad network Komli Media, PubMatic, Jivox and e-commerce firm Letsbuy.com. In the mobile space, it has funded payment gateway Ngpay, voice messaging company Kirusa and SMSGupshup. It is also behind 9.9Media and Getit YellowPages and outsourcing firms Hurix, UnitedLex, Mindworks global media services and ZManda. In the consumer space, it has funded Bangalorebased salon chain YLG, quick service restaurant company Brand Calculus and Mast Kalandar. REDBUS

RedBus has risen from gross revenues of Rs 30 crore in 2008 to Rs 60 crore in the fiscal year ending March, 2010, and now expects to reach Rs 120-150 crore this year. Gross revenues include bus ticket revenues and not just commissions on tickets. When contacted, redBus CEO and co-founder Phanindra Sama declined comment. The start-up is focused on scaling up its ticketing site and its software platform Seat Seller for bus operators. It is also aiding in computerisation of the transport industry. RedBus is adding 100 people this year, primarily to its call centre facility. It also runs offline distribution with 75,000 point of sale outlets and is expanding across the country.

Case Study: redBus and AWS Ride the Road to IT Freedom redBus is an Indian travel agency that specializes in bus travel throughout India by selling bus tickets throughout the country. Tickets are purchased through the companys Website (http://www.redbus.in/ ) or through the Web services of its agents and partners. The company also offers software, on a Software as a Service (SaaS) basis, which gives bus operators the option of handling their own ticketing and managing their own inventories. To date, the company says they have sold over 2 million bus tickets and has more than 100 bus operators using the software to manage their operations.

The company previously ran its operations from a traditional data center by purchasing and renting its systems and infrastructure. In addition to the expense, several logistical problems evolved from this arrangement. The biggest problem was that the infrastructure could not effectively handle processing fluctuations, which had a negative impact on productivity. Additionally, the procurement of servers or upgrading the server configuration was an extremely time-consuming endeavor. Over time, redBus realized that a better solution was imperativea solution that offered scalability to handle the companys processing fluctuations. redBus looked to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for a solution. After testing the AWS solution on a small application for several months, the travel agency determined that it was very workable and convenient. Although redBus was quite enthusiastic about the on-demand instances and

variety of instance types, several other features cemented the companys decision to migrate completely to AWS. These features included the ability to easily manage access to servers through security groups, the easy-to-use, selfservice management console, the concept of Elastic IPs, and superior support. The company has incorporated many of the AWS products into its solution, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), and Amazon CloudWatch. Charan Padmaraju, Chief Technology Officer believes that with features like Elastic Load Balancing and multiple availability zones, AWS provides the required infrastructure to build for redundancy and auto-failover. When you incorporate these in your system/application design, you can achieve high reliability and scale.

Since migrating to AWS, redBus has seen measurable improvements in the bottom line. Padmaraju says, By scaling up and down dynamically based on the load, we maintain performance as well as minimize cost. With the time savings that the IT and development staffs obtain from the AWS solution, AWS gives us an overall cost benefit of about 30-40%. He adds, By hosting at [the AWS Asia Pacific (Singapore) region], redBus.in gained significantly in terms of website performance by way of reduced latency (about 4x). This is a great advantage when the customers are from India. Of the many excellent characteristics of AWS, perhaps the most significant to redBus is the ability to instantly replicate the whole setup on demand for testing by creating and destroying instances on demand for experimentation, thereby reducing the time to market. Less time to market translates to increased profitability and success.

The travel agency anticipates expanding the AWS solution to include Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) for monitoring, alerts, and intercommunication. Amazon SQS is an especially good solution for enabling messaging between external applications and our applications, says Padmaraju. Since joining forces with AWS, redBus has gained the freedom to experiment on new solutions and applications at minimal cost, increased the efficiency of its operations, and improved its profitability. To learn more, visit http://www.redbus.in/ .

redBus Gained Competitive Edge With Its Infrastructure on AWS Cloud A case study on Cloud Computing in Services Varsha Chidambaram

Charan Padmaraju Co-founder and CTO, redBus By moving to the cloud we freed up our resources to develop apps that gave us a competitive edge. Executive summary Moving to the cloud enabled redBus to use IT to create business differentiation and a competitive advantage.

The Organization: About five years back, a few friends working with top IT firms decided to quit their jobs. They wanted to help people book bus tickets online. After planes and trains, booking bus tickets online sounded obvious. But nobody in India had thought about it. Except for the founders of redBus. Today, the company sells bus tickets through its online portal or through the Web services of its agents. To date, redBus claims to have sold over 2 million bus tickets. Case Study Highlights

The cloud solution has empowered Padmarajus developers to focus on building apps based on their business needs and customize for the customer. After moving to the cloud and hosting their infrastructure at the AWS Asia Pacific (Singapore) region, the traffic to redBus has increased 3 folds due to reduced latency.

The Business case: After using a traditional datacenter for over a year, redBus ran into scalability issues. Procuring a new server or upgrading an existing one took more than two weeks. Moreover, the limited server capacity could not effectively handle processing fluctuations, which had a negative impact on productivity. We wanted to open a port on one of our servers and it took two days! On another occasion, the memory size wasn't enough to service the workload, says Charan Padmaraju, co-founder and CTO, redBus. The Project: Padmaraju realized that procuring new hardware was no more an option. He knew the answer lay in a cloud solution. And that was something that wasnt new to redBus. redBus is much larger than its closest competitor in terms of its resource network. To capitalize on that, the company offers software, on a SaaS basis, to its bus operators. This gives them the option of handling their own ticketing and managing their own inventories. The

service helps bus operators get access to a large number of customers.redBus used a cloud vendor, Amazon Web Service (AWS), to build its SaaS offering. First Steps: Padmaraju observed that the entire process of hosting and managing this service was smooth and easy. So he decided to move his entire infrastructure to the cloud. Today, all redBus applications, including the mission critical ones are on the AWS cloud. This solution includes features such as the ability to easily manage access to servers through security groups, easy-to-use self-service management console, the concept of Elastic IPs, and superior support. The cloud solution has empowered Padmarajus developers to focus on building apps based on their business needs and customize for the customer. This was not possible in the older model where developers were spending time making changes to the apps to accommodate the traditional datacenters limited capabilities.

The Benefits: After moving to the cloud and hosting their infrastructure at the AWS Asia Pacific (Singapore) region, the traffic to redBus has increased 3 folds due to reduced latency. This wouldve been possible only in a cloud platform due to its elasticity and scalability. It has also given us an overall cost benefit of about 30 to 40 percent, claims Padmaraju. redBus business no longer needs to wait because of capability limitations associated with a traditional datacenter. As soon as there is a demand, Padmaraju has the infrastructure ready to meet it. The use of cloud technology has given us the competitive edge that helps us to innovate quickly, says Padmaraju.

Operations were growing very fast need of scalability Need a larger ram 32 gb Options install new hardware or use cloud computing Put the order with regular vendor and it took three weeks to procure the ram lost business because could not scale up the infrastructure Key incident why redbus moved to cloud at this stage they looked around for other alternatives. Cloud was the only solution for such a kind of issue Scalability inc/dec - happens instantaneously Eg upgrade/degrade ur ram instantaneously

Looked at multiple clouds Amazon was perfect solution reasons brand/credibility Benefits instant scaling up/down Cost benefits eg. Durin day time load is high (more no. of customers are using the ticket booking facility) cloud automatically scales up itself upgrades the infrastructure giving adequate resources During night time less no. of visitors so it scales down giving optimal resource utilization cost saving ---when not using u r not purchasing the infrastructure Use amazon RDS database completely eliminates the dba position in our office Cost saving on this skill set Elastic scalability

Virtual IP every time u make a new release of the software there is no down time. (no maintenance phase when new releases are made) just put the new s/w to the cloud server Application front cloud cost come down Infrastructure front internal use leverage on open source in a big way All call centers run on open source solution called asteric dont need to pay any charge atall Operating systems ubunto Business intelligence pentagon Leverage on open source highly not faced any big problem Use of mobile use of mobile/cloud/web