Arattai is a Tamil word meaning banter or gossip, it’s also the name of a messaging software developed by the Indian IT firm Zoho of Sridhar Vembu.
“You’ve seen many competitors to WhatsApp emerge over the last few years, Telegram, Signal and many others. I would say even locally, you’ve had some,” said Anirudh Suri, non-resident scholar at Carnegie India who works at the intersection of technology and geopolitics.
Suri was on The Gist, answering questions about Arattai and its larger implications for India’s ecosystem where such products have been launched and failed in the past, Koo for instance, which was the Indian twitter.
“I think it’s never too late to start, to mount a challenge to a company or a product like WhatsApp. I think there are many unknowns today for anyone to definitively say that this will be India’s answer to WhatsApp,” he said.
But he noted that Sridhar Vembu has long been a proponent of India’s tech stack. It’s early days to be able to say definitively but it seems Arattai is not based on the typical AWS, Microsoft Azure servers, though, it is built on its own cloud servers based in India. There’s also no doubt it’s been built by a purely Indian team.
Is Arattai a superior offering to WhatsApp? Suri believes that certain features are still a work in progress. The end to end encryption, which is a highly favoured element on WhatsApp, is still being worked on for Arattai. Then again, Arattai is okay with voice calling but the chat element has some way to go.
It’s also important to note that consumers will not move easily from one product to another unless they are being offered something much superior. This is where the stabiliyt of the existing product and its viability are huge attractions.
Is Arattai trying to copy WhatsApp?
“I hope not. I think that for any competitor to emerge, typically you cannot be a pure replica or a copy of the the existing incumbent which is such a massive winner currently,” Suri said.
“I think you have to adopt what I would say is a guerrilla strategy, where you find a niche where you are better than the incumbent, where the incumbent is not focused on building let’s say, the best features or the best infrastructure or the right targeted set of features for the end user.”
In that case, by focusing on the niche, one could emerge the winner even if it is a smaller niche.
Tune in for more in this conversation with Anirudh Suri, non-resident scholar at Carnegie India, on Arattai, India’s version of WhatsApp.
Thirty eight years in journalism, widely travelled, history buff with a preference for Old Monk Rum. Current interest/focus spans China, Technology and Trade. Recent reads: Steven Colls Directorate S and Alexander Frater's Chasing the Monsoon. Netflix/Prime video junkie. Loves animal videos on Facebook. Reluctant tweeter.
