Modi government made it easier for global tech firms to establish footprint in India: DocuSign president Robert Chatwani

Chatwani, president and general manager of growth at DocuSign also spoke about the adoption of technology for governance and other areas in India.

“My understanding is all of that legislation has come under Narendra Modi’s administration. I think it’s just one indication of how technology and adopting technology, not only for the government but just at large, has really changed under Prime Minister Modi’s leadership in the last several years,” Chatwani told PTI.

Encouraged by the changing technological environment, DocuSign, a San Francisco-based company that allows organisations to manage electronic agreements, has announced it is committed to building a full engineering and development centre Bengaluru.

“We are really excited about the market, not just because of the employee base we’ll build there, but also because of the market opportunity for DocuSign,” said Chatwani, who took over as the president 90 days ago.

Before joining DocuSign, Chatwani served as the chief marketing officer at Atlassian, a SaaS company.

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He oversaw teams across marketing, brand, communications and data science, and worked with the product organisation to help scale Atlassian’s business to nearly $3 billion in revenue. Prior to Atlassian, he served as chief revenue & marketing Officer for the social ecommerce platform Spring. He also spent more than a decade at eBay, ending his tenure as CMO of North America where his teams supported $35 billion in annual trading volume.

“And DocuSign, which we haven’t opened our office yet, but it’s coming this year. What I’ll say, in every one of those examples, compared to even a decade or more ago, it’s becoming a lot easier for global companies to establish a footprint there, especially in these technology zones, in particular, the companies I have been , in Chennai, Bangalore, or Hyderabad,” Chatwani told PTI.

“It’s no longer just a cost factor, but really access to talent. Some of the best talents in each of these companies, and hopefully now at DocuSign, come out as a result of our footprint in India. My sense is that under the Modi administration, attracting FDI from technology companies has been a big focus, and we’ve benefited quite a bit from that,” Chatwani said.

But at the same time, he noted that while from a large company perspective, probably it’s quite easy, for small to midsize companies, it is still a struggle.

“In my last company, Atlassian, we had a network of partners that were much smaller companies, but they would build their technology on our platform. They attempted to also build an India footprint to get software development cycles going 24 hours. I’ve heard from at least one of them that they struggled because, as a smaller company of maybe under 500 or under 1,000 employees, they found it a lot more difficult to get established and get a footprint in India,” he said.