There is a word called ‘showrooming’ which refers to the phenomenon where people go to a shop to check out some goods like books, toys or clothes, and then buy it online at an online retailer like Amazon or Flipkart. So if you have a physical shop, how do you make sure your prices are lower than those online, and how do you make sure ‘showrooming’ turns into actual buying? Enter Boomerang Commerce, which makes software that aims to ‘democratise retail analytics’. In English, it means the company uses complex tools to analyse data and lets the brick and mortar stores to change their prices dynamically so they can compete with online stores. And it makes sense that the man behind Boomerang Commerce is Guru Hariharan, an Amazon veteran who understands how online retail works. Guru has a B.E in Computer Engineering from the Delhi Institute of Technology, an MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin and an MBA from University of Pennsylvania’s The Wharton School. After co-founding Vidyajyothi Technologies which provides web-based educational services to Indian students at the beginning of the century, Guru joined Amazon in 2004 as an Engineering Lead and over the next few years has been appointed a Manager of Demand Generation at Amazon Services and a head of Amazon Dev Center as the manager of Amazon Webstore. Guru is the holder of a number of patents and is now the CEO of Boomerang Commerce.
GURU HARIHARAN