HomeGrown Software Brands: Made in India

(Continued from last week)

Some other stories...

Other banking product success stories include Tata Infotech and Delhi-based Nucleus Software Exports - a 15-year-old company that moved from consultancy and services to solutions and now has a stable of software products in the banking and financial services segment.

Nucleus' flagship product is Finness, which is essentially an integrated suite that provides solutions for both the asset and liability side of the business, core financial accounting and customer service. Interestingly, as a Rs 55-crore company, it gets 23 percent of its revenues from products, of which 21 percent comes from Finness alone. Introducing four new products last month, the company also announced that it would be investing close to Rs 10 crore over the next two years in product development.

But are banking products the only sector Indian companies venture into?

Walking some other roads

Obviously not. Though banking and financial services dominate the Indian software product story-as they do the entire Indian software story for that matter-there are other companies looking at other application areas and business verticals.

Chennai-based Ramco Systems, for instance, first launched its flagship product Marshal in 1994. By the time Marshal 3.0 was released by Bill Gates in Mumbai in 1997, it was a full ERP suite consisting of over 30 applications, including discrete manufacturing, treasury and quality applications. Two years later, Marshal 3.1 was re-branded as Ramco e. Around that time, the generic mass market for ERP was breaking up into clusters of vertical industries and the Internet had emerged as a significant business medium. Therefore, Ramco e was built keeping in mind the new verticalization and featured Web products designed for the various stakeholders in an enterprise. The next version-Marshal 4.0-is planned for a 2002 launch and the company says it will build in strains that will support what it calls c-commerce (collaborative commerce).

Ramco has a diverse customer base. For instance, Ramco's process manufacturing solution is among the top such product for chemicals, food and beverages, metals and textiles industries in the US market, while its enterprise asset management solution has reasonable acceptance in the aviation, utility and facilities management market. Recently, Ramco and Boeing also announced a partnership to provide solutions to the global aviation maintenance market.

The company forayed into enterprise product vending at a time when the ERP market was dominated by the likes of SAP and Baan. From small beginnings, its operations are today spread across 1,000 customers in 11 countries.

Another company that ventured into the ERP space was Eastern Software Systems, with its Web-enabled ERP system called Ebizframe. When Anil Bakht and Sanjay Agarwal set up the company in 1990, they started with hospital management software. In 1998, they announced an ERP package specifically targeted at the SME segment and, a year later, were among the first to offer ASP services through their ERP-on-the-net offering. Recently, the company has launched a WAP-enabled enterprise solution called Cellbiz. Though largely oriented towards the domestic market at the moment, the company gets 20 percent of its revenues from West Asia and hopes to venture farther afield shortly.

This is by no means a comprehensive list. There are a host of other products and companies and not all of them can be reasonably covered here. But this begs a question-if there are in fact Indian software products of international standards, and if they have been around for a reasonable length of time, why aren't they as big as one would have a right to expect?

The challenges

In two words-marketing muscle. There are various expert estimates on what it takes to market a software product internationally. But all of them agree on one thing-it takes more to market a product than to produce it. And more of almost everything-money, international presence, branding and plain marketing savvy. It also requires a different mindset-the ability to pour money down a project on which no returns are foreseeable.

None of these are typical characteristics of a nascent industry. This is the major reason why the profile of Indian product offerings looks the way it does: heavy on banking, telecom and enterprise. No operating systems or databases... though one wonders what happened to Wipro's Unix offering
Winix.

Being in niche verticals like banking saves companies the cost of saturation advertising. They are able, instead, to look at more focussed branding exercises for their target audience.

Infosys, for instance, has a very clear three-stage marketing strategy for entry into international markets for its banking products. In what it calls its 'Entry Focus', not only does it carry out market research and gap analysis, it also does preliminary brand building and market-sensitization. This is largely through select advertisements, participation in seminars and some press interviews that build up visibility. They also enter into services and sales partnerships locally and leverage that for local presence till they get their first breakthrough.

In Stage II, or what it calls its 'Growth Focus', Infosys begins to get aggressive, targeting 20-25 percent of all new deals. Says Merwin, "Bankers are known to be conservative. They have to be, for they deal with others' money. Therefore, a breakthrough is not very easy. But the same conservatism that works against us in the beginning begins to work for us after we make our first sale. And increases with every sale. Being a tried and tested product is a big plus after that." By the time the company comes to its final consolidation stage, Infosys begins to look at 40 percent of all new deals.

Forging partnerships

Whatever their particular marketing strategies may be, local participation is crucial for all companies in the international market. Product sales require knowledge of local markets, local lingo and extensive local presence. iFlex deals with this through local hiring. Says Senthil, "As much as possible, we are using local people for marketing and sales. The customer-facing team almost anywhere is likely to be local-the Netherlands, UK or America." Infosys, on the other hand, deals with this through local partnerships. "Our sales partners in every market handle the front end, including making day-to-day calls and providing the first level of support," says Merwin. Their service partners provide higher levels of support, including, often, implementation as well.

Finally, however, both companies have found that partnering with infrastructure vendors like HP, Compaq, IBM and Digital works well. For instance, the iFlex-IBM relationship happened, says Senthil, "when we started succeeding in a space we weren't present before. They were in the AS400 and S390 space when the Unix solution started winning. So we signed up a technology partnership in 1999. Subsequently, they came to us and told us how the MQ series could be used to integrate
Flexcube".

Finally, however, no one thing is sufficient. Says Girish A Menon, vice-president (global marketing and planning) at Ramco Systems, "The strategy has to be multi-pronged. Marketing a product, particularly an enterprise solution, depends a lot on the maturity level of the market itself."

Ramco's marketing strategy is also focussed around partnerships in the international market. Says Menon, "To this end, we've put in place a global partnership program-Ramco Value Net." The most significant partnership the company has forged in recent times is with aviation major Boeing, under which the latter will market Ramco's aviation solutions, together with its own modules under the brand name Enterprise One.

But do these sound like stories of intermittent successes? Of exceptions rather than the rule?

The days ahead...

Perhaps. A lot is changing, however. Indian software giants today have more cash available for investment in R&D, their brand value is high and growing, technology issues are no longer an impediment as they once used to be and most of the big companies today are very brand-savvy. They also have a huge advantage coming from a services and solutions background, these companies have built up considerable domain expertise in verticals like telecom, retail, logistics and VLSI and chip design. It may be a slower route to productization, but it is also a very sure route.

Quite clearly, the Indian software products story has not ended. It is just beginning. Watch this space.

(Concluded)

By Sarita Rani in Bangalore. Inputs from Shrikanth G in Chennai, Meghna Sharma in Delhi and Easwardas N in Mumbai

Source: www.dqindia.com