A Success Story with Ashish Sharma of Oak Tree Software
Software development has witnessed tremendous transformation and with this opportunities for software developers also expanded over the time. Figuring out what’s best for software developers is a question depending on market demand.
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Today we have with us Founder of Oak Tree Software Ashish Sharma. Oak Tree specialises in digital technologies, cloud and Salesforce platform solutions providing specialized talents across more than 20 industries.
Ashish is from Indore, Madhya Pradesh seemed quite enthusiastic as he went to elaborate his journey in the field of entrepreneurship and challenges he faced on the way in bringing up Oak Tree when he started.
About Oak Tree
Oak Tree believes in the potential of transformation to provide value and shared success for our customers, people, shareholders, and partners. The organization facilitates customized solutions based on the client’s requirements exclusively at a cost-effective price and within a specified time frame.
The company has successfully developed and delivered over 400+ projects on cutting-edge technologies such as Salesforce, ROR, React native, Heroku, and more.
As per Ashish, providing experienced developers who are well versed in Salesforce implementation offering consultation, development and enterprise Mobile & web applications development are some of the core services that Oak Tree specialises in.
We have a team of over 150+ highly qualified developers on standby to work on any complex client wants and few of the team members also work remotely.
Ashish is a thorough IT guy who has worked previously in various organizations with 12 yrs of experience. It’s been 6 yrs since he started Oak Tree mainly focuses on providing salesforce developers and other softwares like ‘Epic’ and .NET and Java.
On Acquiring First Client for Oak Tree
With a smile Ashish explained how they worked through various portals and a few references from previous projects they worked on.
Sitting in Dubai one of his friends referred him for a project. The project was delivered and the payment was his first salary he got paid, that was when Ashish took the decision to start business on his own.
From the start of his career Ashish has been on the delivery side so building other departments in Oak Tree from the beginning like HR, marketing with limited resources and knowledge from scratch was a challenge but taking challenges in a positive way helped Ashish move forward.
On Challenges
When faced with a challenge, it’s natural to feel overwhelmed and defeated. ‘Converting challenges into opportunity’ has been the core motto that helped Ashish and Oak Tree grow’.
Right from hiring to screening candidates, wherever challenges came in Ashish implemented strategy like hiring with more focus in screening the right candidates, implementing the right set of technology, talking to experts and taking their suggestions and navigating through the challenges.
“Being in business for the last six years, every year brought a different set of challenges,” he elaborates:
“Challenges faced in the first year of operation were solved, and in the second year, those were no longer issues, but a new set of challenges emerged.”
Reframing problems with a positive outlook helps us identify hidden opportunities’ that became the bread and butter for the organization, echoed Ashsih.
Now Oak Tree is trying to scale up and increase team size to 200 to 250 people and build the right departments, infrastructure they are reaching out there as today’s challenges will be tomorrow opportunities to grow further.
Training with Right Module for Developers
For Training with new age technologies like AI and Chat GPT, Oak tree received an AI project and it was when they realised that training developers with the right module of technologies is paramount.
They reached out to market and hired additional people as they had few people versed in AI based technologies. We looked for talents well versed in top notch architecture, solutions architect or product manager. So definitely reaching out to these kinds of people who have different kinds of expertise in the domain market helps.
We do in house training a lot of times and if you see Velocity in Salesforce is very popular the last few yrs and we conducted in house training on velocity for our Sales force developer. For AI we specifically conducted training and for that we hired trainers externally, says Ashish.
On asking if all product managers require training on AI, he says product managers working on legacy products have advantage of working in product management skills But working on AI ,chat GPT require different skill sets and present day demands for product managers apt in AI technologies will be in great demand. More than skill set it gives exposure to other many areas of technology and understanding technology better to develop better products.
We will always give preference to candidates who need to hire Java developers or other developers but don’t have vast experience in many areas. However, if a candidate has worked on any AI project, we will give them preference, as that is most in demand in present times.
Ashish smiles as he goes on that very soon AI will disrupt many areas of work and that is happening also helping organisations scale up as AI itself is a new market.
We have a lot of demand from those who want to hire Python developers, AI developers, and Generative AI specialists. Once, a group of doctors approached us wanting developers with experience in Generative AI use cases on EPIC software. EPIC is a classic healthcare software. There’s no doubt that AI will disrupt and shut down many legacy-based systems and software soon.
Age of AI
Post Covid from 2019, this is a decade of AI and we will soon see how AI will take over, keeping this in mind we at Oak Tree are hiring a lot of developers well versed in AI. From Data engineers to Data scientist we prefer hiring candidates with AI based skills.
Mentorship
While working in his first job, the cofounder Mr George Verghese a known name in the Salesforce ecosystem, who has built multiple partners for Sales force worldwide and Srikant Keshava were his guiding mentors and inspirational force.
Ashish says ’I was new in the company working as a developer, but over the years I learnt from them how to build a company and skills of entrepreneurship’. His father, who is also in the family business, is also one of his mentors.
Future plans and growth
The plan is to add more developers with relevant skill sets in teams and grow upto 300 size and keep adding every 2 yrs. There are big players in the market but if we can add value to our customers, deliver on timely projects we see a bright future and growth will come subsequently, says Ashish with confidence.
As for Ashish he plans to stay in IT business for the rest of his life and at this moment Oak Tree is placed at the right time and moment and growth will come if systematically all projects can be delivered on time.
Now Oak Tree is based in Indore and they are trying to keep the ground strong hold on to it while operating from Indore which is Ashish’s home town also. But plans for expansion are there in Bangalore in coming years. Sales operations are based in the US and a small team resides in Bangalore operating remotely.
Right now priority for Ashish is understanding client requirements and their pain points’, working to solve them. Along with it figuring out a right set of team who can deliver on specific projects and over delivering at times which is important in IT at times.
Advice to New Age Entrepreneurs
When I started it was around 2016, now time is different and these days’ young entrepreneurs are smarter in sales, marketing then we were at this age, says Ashish.
The key points remain the same, one is delivering value to customers and following up the commitment to clients that is essential in brand building’.
With this we come to the end of an interesting conversation with a young entrepreneur who can inspire many of us.
