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The Ultimate Modern Infinite Enterprise – Inflection Points Podcast Season 2 Episode 5

Extreme Office of the CTO Office of the CTO Published 18 Apr 2022

Inflection Points podcast host Tim Harrison said last season about the concept of the Infinite Enterprise: Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. It’s everywhere.

His statement is true.  Companies are now more decentralized and have transitioned to distributed workforces and distributed customer bases. This has forced companies to build at scale and increasingly ensure they employ consumer-centric tactics to win people over. At Extreme Networks, we call a business who makes this shift a Modern Infinite Enterprise.

You might see the media picking up on this story in pieces without tying all the parts together. For example, you’ve likely seen articles about how people are coming back to work at some offices while others allow hybrid arrangements or move to remote-only. Reporters write about how businesses are increasingly moving to digital platforms and how Netflix has “changed everything” with its customer-catering algorithm.

But some businesses are putting all three components of the Infinite Enterprise together in one fell swoop. That’s what Nisha Kesavan of Design Duality has done with her company in India. She has an idea that is the most obvious Infinite Enterprise business we have ever come across. She doesn’t just tick the boxes of the Infinite Enterprise; she circles them, underlines them, and dots them with a highlighter.

Her company makes and distributes saris – Indian dresses, the kind you’ve seen before, even if you don’t know the name. Of course, businesses in India have manufactured and sold saris for years. India is blessed with an endless array of textiles and tailors. Customized fine garments are just one of India’s most magnificent customs.

But her market isn’t local. It’s international. What’s different here is that Nisha employs network-based tech with an application that allows for significant – I’m not going to tell you how much, but it’s a lot – customization on every sari she gets made. You hand over your sizes, and she can get any sari you want made, just for you, with those highly skilled tailors who are all over her backyard. She can scale to one person, or she can provide 1000 for a company. It all depends on what you want.

It turns out there’s a lot of want. When you migrate from India to North Carolina, Calgary, or Copenhagen, it can be hard to get a customized sari that fits you correctly the way it should. You can do it, but the industry just isn’t the same if you shop locally in any of those places.

Nisha has provided one of the finest examples of bringing the store to the customer. Her entire client base is distributed, by design. Her company scales up and down. And is she customer-centric? She can fit you down to the smallest measurement.

That’s the Modern Infinite Enterprise in action. But Nisha should explain the rest: It’s her business and her great idea. Tune in and download Episode 5 of Season 2 of Inflection Points, hosted by Tim Harrison and Carla Guzzetti, with new episodes dropping every other Wednesday:

 

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