Ashwin Vora keeps the business of connection working

California is still home, even when Mumbai takes most of his time. In a public exchange with an old GenRad colleague, Ashwin Vora described returning to the Bay Area three or four times a year. He remembered Milpitas, enjoyed the recollection of their working days, and praised his colleague’s training sessions. It is a small, friendly scene in a career usually described through corporate titles. Before the software services and marketing databases, there were people whose work he remembered.

Vora is the co-founder and current CEO of aMarketForce, the B2B demand generation business established in 2002. He also co-founded V-Soft, the software services company founded in 1995. The two enterprises give his career an unusual continuity: engineering on one side, the practical business of reaching prospective customers on the other. Both depend on making work travel successfully between organizations.

There is little glamour in a contact record that contains the correct information. Its reward is that somebody can use it. Much the same could be said of software testing, another business Vora’s company pursued. The successful result often looks perfectly ordinary. Ordinary, in these cases, takes considerable arranging.

Four gold medals, then the business of engineering

Vora’s educational record includes a bachelor’s degree in engineering at MS University in India, where he received four gold medals for academic performance. It also includes an engineering master’s at Stanford and an MBA at Santa Clara. The combination covers the technical work and the business decisions that surround it: how something functions, and how an organization makes a living delivering it.

His corporate career included managing product lifecycles at technology companies and running GenRad’s California division as general manager. He oversaw that division’s divestiture before establishing V-Soft. These are operating responsibilities, with products, employees and transactions attached. They place his entrepreneurial beginnings after experience inside an existing technology business, rather than at the beginning of his working life.

V-Soft brought Indian development resources to customers internationally. A software services business must translate a client’s requirements into work another team can carry out. Technical competence matters throughout, but so do the conversations around specifications, revisions and delivery. Vora’s move into outsourced engineering put those conversations at the center of the commercial arrangement.

When the customer brought the next platform

In January 2010, V-Soft announced an Android application development practice. Its explanation was refreshingly practical: customers had approached the company for help with the platform. The business had already been working in mobile development for more than five years. Android added another set of skills to a field that already demanded knowledge of several competing systems.

Vora’s explanation of the opportunity concerned the cost of keeping up. New devices and platforms required specialized engineers and continual investment. A customer might need that expertise without wanting to build every capability internally. “Not all companies can afford to have this level of expertise in-house,” he said. That sentence describes the service provider’s opening with rather less ceremony than a grand technological manifesto.

The announcement named Android alongside iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian and other platforms in V-Soft’s broader repertoire. Read today, the list also records a particular moment in mobile computing: several systems competing for attention, each bringing its own development requirements. For the service business, variety created work. For the customer, it created decisions about where to spend engineering time.

Vora presented the Android team as support for existing customers as well as prospective ones. That detail matters. The next line of business could emerge from a relationship already underway. A customer’s new technical problem became a reason to extend the work, with familiarity providing a useful starting point.

“Not all companies can afford to have this level of expertise in-house.”

Ashwin Vora, on mobile platform development, 2010

The music had to travel, too

Another 2010 announcement supplied a concrete example. V-Soft entered a strategic alliance with Catch Media, whose Play Anywhere platform supported access to digital media across devices. V-Soft was building mobile and smartphone applications integrated with that platform. The work placed its engineering team inside a service concerned with getting people’s media collections to them wherever they wanted to listen.

Catch Media had partnered with Carphone Warehouse on Music Anywhere. The service let users reach their music libraries through supported phones and the web, and cached frequently played songs on the device. The convenience described in the announcement was easy to understand. The engineering behind that convenience had to accommodate different mobile platforms and a larger media system.

Catch Media CEO Yaacov Ben-Yaacov praised V-Soft’s engineers for meeting the project’s demanding deadlines. Vora, in turn, described customer alliances as part of a longer business strategy. “V-Soft has a long term strategy of forging alliances with key customers to support them in their development needs,” he said.

The connection also appears in aMarketForce’s present leadership: Ben-Yaacov is listed as a board member. A dated engineering partnership and a current board listing show two points in the same professional network. They give substance to the cross-border alliances in Vora’s career, beyond a list of places on a biography.

There is a business in checking the work

By October 2010, V-Soft was announcing mobile application testing services. Vora said the company had developed, tested and delivered more than 100 mobile application solutions. That was a company-reported milestone at the time, rather than a measure of its present output. It nevertheless gives the period a little scale.

The testing offer covered functionality, usability, security, load and device coverage across major mobile platforms. It also included checks relating to application store certification and interface standards. Those categories describe different ways an application can disappoint its users. An attractive interface cannot compensate for a feature that fails; a feature that works on one device still needs attention on another.

Vora treated the rapid arrival of devices and platforms as a commercial opportunity. The customer faced an expanding testing problem; V-Soft offered a team organized to handle it. Alongside development, verification became another service to sell. It is an instructive part of his record because it deals with the less theatrical half of making technology useful: checking whether the promised result survives actual use.

From a working application to a useful introduction

aMarketForce takes the story into sales and marketing. Its services include developing contact lists, verifying records, enriching existing data and cleaning CRM databases, alongside lead generation and content promotion. Its San Jose base and Indian delivery centers give the business an international operating structure.

The company’s earlier history shows a broader marketing services offer. A January 2011 announcement described completing a communications strategy for a marketing automation customer introducing a new service. Reshma Nigam, then aMarketForce’s CEO, discussed working with the customer on both planning and execution. Vora was identified as chairman in a February 2010 corporate presentation; the current leadership listing identifies him as CEO.

Those titles belong to their respective moments. They also keep the story properly collective. aMarketForce’s work has involved other executives and delivery teams, while Vora’s role has changed over time. The founder’s place in a company does not make every campaign his personal campaign, any more than a software company’s CEO personally writes every line of code.

The contact data work provides a clear connection with the engineering story. Verification has a practical purpose in both settings. An application needs to behave as expected; a contact list needs to be useful to the person trying to reach its members. The comparison is an editorial one, but the services themselves make it possible.

The colleagues behind the connections

Vora’s public recommendations give a more personal view of what he notices at work. In a recommendation for former country manager Anand Sanchorawala, he praised management and service delivery innovations. In another, for Durga Sharma, he singled out clear goals, team management and an ability to learn new technologies, including SEO. His praise was attached to particular contributions.

A recommendation Vora received from Alan Kenny describes a manager with a comfortable demeanor, positive employee relationships and an ability to prioritize business interests. It is one colleague’s assessment, and it offers a useful counterweight to the formal executive biography. The qualities remembered are recognizable office virtues: judgment, steadiness and the ability to work with people.

Then there is that exchange about GenRad. Vora’s recollection of Milpitas included a compliment to someone who had led training sessions. Decades of corporate history can become a procession of company names. A remembered colleague restores the human scale. The lesson, if there is one, lies in how specific the memory remains.

His life between Mumbai and California supplies a fitting final detail. The geography of his companies is also part of his own routine, though he describes it more warmly than an office directory ever could. “California is my home too,” he wrote. After the platforms, partnerships and databases, the word that stays with the reader is home.