JetBrains sharpens focus on India expansion; sees strong interest in Kotlin among developers

Soma Tah

Prague based JetBrains, which makes intelligent, and efficient tools for software developers has sharpened its expansion strategy in India to engage the vast developer community through various engagement activities and outreach programmes. The company is looking to propagate the use of the company's tools for efficient coding and enthuse the beginners with interactive learning support.

The company has been creating tools for software developers for the past 17 years and has an extensive lineup of 24 tools today including integrated development environment (IDEs), tools for project management, CICD, code reviews, QA testing, etc. such as IntelliJ IDEA, ReSharper, to name a few. The tools are more generic in nature, except the MPS platform, which caters to the specific customization needs of businesses.

In 2010, the company started building its programming language, Kotlin, which has seen significant adoption in the mobile development space all over the world and eventually made its way into the list of officially supported languages for Android, such as Java last year.

Incidentally, Google’s mobile app development platform, Android Studio is also based on the open source version of another commercial product of JetBrains, IntelliJ IDEA.

Talking about the expansion objective of JetBrains in India, Hadi Hariri, VP of Developer Advocacy - ‎JetBrains, who visited India recently said, “We target developers and have been on an expansion spree for the past seven years primarily in the cities across Europe and the US. But from last year onwards, we started expanding ourselves into Asia as well, starting with China, Japan, South Korea, and India. Interestingly, a growing base of our users happens to be from India, although we never had an active physical presence in India earlier. This India expansion program will definitely help us to get closer to them and engage deeply with them."

"India is an important market because it has a large developer community heavily focused on mobile development, and we see a greater interest in Kotlin arising from India," added he.

"We have seen almost one million downloads of our tools in India last year, which amounts to almost 5 percent of our total consumption. India is an important market for us as the developers from India are not just writing codes for India particularly- they do the development for other countries also," said Javed Mohamed, Country Manager - India, JetBrains.

India has a vibrant base of startups, and JetBrains is looking to enable them also with its tools. The company has a global offering of 50 percent discounts on its products -which is an engaging proposition for the startups.

The company is seeing a growing interest among the developers towards artificial intelligence, machine learning, and blockchain and is trying to enable them with efficient tools.

"We have seen see an upswing in interest on machine learning and data science and released tools like Datalore and PyCharm to cater to this demand. We have also seen a lot of Python users switching to Kotlin for machine learning," said Hariri.

While the company is creating tools to enable the developers working with some of these interesting and emerging technologies,  it is also using some of them to understand the user behavior and to refine its tools accordingly. "By using machine learning, we are trying to understand what kind of codes developers want to write and trying to make them aware of possible bugs and security loopholes beforehand," said he.

JetBrains spends a considerable amount of time around software development and teaching people programming and sees a lot of feature enhancement ideas, and contributions from the developers on its open source products as well.

Under the JetBrains Ambassador Program, the company promotes the tools among students in universities and teaches them how to use those tools. It also partners with educational institutes and colleges to provide the students free access to all its tools and therefore, engages with 750,000 users from the student segment alone.

JetBrains has an online learning platform, called Stepik and is also talking to online educational course providers to provide professional courses for the developers.