By Shruti Chakraborty
 
In the world of cricket today, defeating an opponent does not begin on the 22 yards anymore. It starts hours, maybe days before. Think about it. If you were an international fast bowler who knew that Suresh Raina has gotten out to a short-pitched delivery in more than 10 matches, what would your first ball to him be? This sort of information is what forms the foundation of Sanjay Rao's venture Sportingmindz, which offers a product that is helping identify and resolve some of the questions and problems within sports by leveraging technology and software services.

Rao, 35, set up Sportingmindz in 2006 with Sandeep Kannambadi, 37, and former India cricketer Vijay R Bharadwaj, 37. Prior to starting Sportingmindz, Rao and Kannambadi were working at Wipro, while Kannambadi and Bharadwaj are childhood friends.

Analysis ahoy!
Though it started slow, the company today works with Indian Premier League (IPL) teams, state and national cricket teams, UAE's premier league and the Tour de France.

Amongst the services it offers are sports analysis and a platform to connect sports persons to coaches around the world by using the cloud. Some of the teams it works with include the Royal Challengers Bangalore, Kings IX Punjab, and the Karnataka State Cricket Association, says Rao, now CEO at Sportingmindz.

Sportingmindz has various products like 22yardz, a cricket match analysis software, SKRUTiN, a motion analysis software, which can be used to scrutinize the technique and biomechanics of a player in various sports such as cricket, tennis and golf, and DRAGflik, a hockey match analysis software.

With these and a few other products analyzing table tennis, tennis and football, the company works towards improving the sporting abilities a team possesses, Rao tells us.

He explains that while these products facilitate technique and match analysis, there is also a database of the style and key traits of many sportspersons that one can refer to so as to strategize before a match. In all, Sportingmindz has collected cricket data and videos of over six terabytes.

The tech edge
"The software products also help the sports administration to plan, schedule, monitor, track, and improve the overall functioning of the system including athletes, coaches, trainers, physios, and institutions," he says, adding that the company provides end-to-end back office support for storage, retrieval and analytical solutions.

For the tech and software development, the company partnered with the Microsoft BizSpark program in 2008, a global program that helps software startups succeed by giving them access to software development tools, connecting them with key industry players, and providing marketing visibility.

K Rajinish Menon, Director, ISV & Cloud Strategy at Microsoft BizSpark said Sportingmindz is building the requisite tool sets & skill sets for sports associations; thereby ultimately helping the sportsmen and associations give their very best.

Touching the grassroots
According to Rao, the company also works with individuals. It has a panel of experts on a number of sports including coaches and trainers and nutritionists based in various parts of the world, who can view videos that are digitized by the Sportingmindz team, of an individual's performance and provide guidance and feedback and detailed reports of the player's performance, strengths and weaknesses.

With its panel of experts, the company has a revenue sharing model in place. The panel of experts gets about 15-25 percent of the revenue.

The company currently works with a team of 25 people of which two are based in South Africa.

In India, they are working with 20 schools till date. "We work on games like table tennis, hockey, football, badminton, lawn tennis, cricket and golf," Rao shares. Young sportspersons in India don't get access to coaching of international standards in the country for many sports, he says.

This impacts India's performance in sports at the international level negatively, and is something Rao wants to change quickly.

The run ahead
Rao says that Sportingmindz was set up with an initial investment of Rs. 1 crore, of which Rs. 50 lakh was received as angel investment. The company had a turnover of Rs. 1.5 crore last year and it broke even in the second year of its operations.

Rao reveals that Sportingmindz's products are made available to customers on a subscription model.

"The IPL teams and cricket teams are charged for a year or for a season. The annual contract with an IPL team costs the teams between Rs. 15-25 lakh. The school students are charged
Rs. 1,000 per student for a year's subscription," he says.

Rao says that the company is looking to expand to international markets for its next stage of growth.

He adds that it has already begun working with schools in the UK and the US last month where it charges $2,000 per school.

"We know that being based on the cloud reduces the need to be physically present in any of the places that our customers are located," says Rao about the tech edge that can help them expand significantly both in geography and speed.

With such a wide reach, the world indeed seems to be an oyster for the team at Sportingmindz.

© Entrepreneur India August 2012