Our Journey to the Blue Ocean

Color of our strategy is blue

Blue Ocean Strategy, this book has always intrigued me since Kim and Mauborgne authored it way back in 2004.

My countless readings of this book, influenced my strategic outlook as CEO, the most. This time I choose to write about Blue Ocean Strategy for my SME readers with my substantive learning.

To give you a brief background, authors refer Red Ocean and Blue Ocean as the markets where you are doing business. Red Oceans are existing markets full of vicious competition, crowded and predatory. Blue Oceans are unexplored, uncontested and profitable.

According to the authors, life in Red Oceans and Blue Ocean are different. Players in Red Oceans spend their all resources/energy to survive and attain survival only. Players in Blue Ocean channelize their resources/energy to exploit enormous potential of uncontested market.

I compare it with profound essence of Indian Spirituality. Till the time you attain Moksha, cycle of birth, fight to survive, death, rebirth, fight to survive, death continues for countless times. I rephrase in this context, till the time you arrive in Blue Ocean, you are born, dead, re-born, dead and so on, in Red Oceans.

I encourage my all entrepreneur readers to actively think about how to arrive in Blue Ocean for your business. I am touching this topic for a very specific reason. The book gives some great examples of enterprises who arrived at Blue Ocean. They are like,

Cirque du Soleil: Blending of opera and ballet with circus format while eliminating star performer and animals;
Netjets: fractional jet ownership;
Southwest Airlines: offering flexibility of bus travel at the speed of air travel using secondary airports;
Curves: redefining market boundaries between health clubs and home exercise programs for women;
Home Depot: offering the prices and range of lumber yard, while offering consumers classes to help them with DIY projects;

None of the prominent examples are B2B. They are all B2C. Does that mean, it is unusual and difficult to arrive in Blue Ocean for a B2B business? My most readers are entrepreneurs in B2B businesses. Let me share with you how we reached to Blue Ocean at Synersoft, and that too in B2B segment.

Let us elaborate on Blue Ocean Strategy and check how we reached there. Excerpts from the book

Quote: Blue Ocean strategy, on the other hand, is based on the reconstructionist view. Assuming that structure and market boundaries exist only in managers’ minds, practitioners who hold this view do not let existing market structures limit their thinking. To them, extra demand is out there, largely untapped. The crux of the problem is how to create it. By expanding the demand side of the economy, new wealth is created. Such a strategy therefore allows firms to largely play a non–zero-sum game, with high payoff possibilities. UnQuote

Synersoft is in business of IT solutions to non-IT businesses, which is a known Red Ocean. Markets for Computers, Laptops, Firewalls, Servers, NAS, Antivirus, Backup Solutions, Software, Email Services, IT consulting, are the Red Ocean Markets, observed as low margin, thankless, box-moving focused, fiercely competitive and difficult battle for survival.

Instead of investing huge capital to source materials at lower cost, we decided to question the fundamentals.

Why would a non-IT enterprise buy all these? The answer is, for being and remaining globally competitive through operational efficiency.

We further asked, what do they expect from these systems? The answer is, as IT critically helps them to make and keep globally competitive, they want stable IT systems to ensure business continuity and they want information security to prevent competitive exploitation of their digitally formed business secrets (designs, drawings, IPR, NDAs, Tender Bids).

We asked, do you buy these IT systems with confidence that it will serve the purpose? The answer differed as per the size of enterprise. To our pleasant surprise, enterprises having less than 200 computers and more than 15 computers answered that they find all these systems very expensive and they are not sure if these systems will solve their problems of data scattered-ness, Data Loss and Data Theft. To our delightful surprise, we found that such enterprises exist in millions in this world.

This was our express toll road to reach the mysterious blue ocean. We invested all our resources to develop technology which makes sure that enterprise does not lose data, hence business continuity and enterprise does not get competitively exploited by data leakage or theft.

That’s how, BLACKbox was conceived, born, raised and presented to non-IT enterprises. With thousands of deployments, we are not fighting for survival. Our product is extremely cost effective in the hands of customer and handsomely profitable in hands of Synersoft compared to buying or selling those Red Ocean market products.

So, this is our journey to Blue Oceans. Do comment if you have gone through such a journey to Blue Oceans in your business.

Best Regards,

Vishal Shah
Founder and CEO,
Synersoft Technologies Pvt Ltd