Betting High on the Enterprise Software Market Date:   Tuesday , April 12, 2011 The enterprise market in India is seeing a pivotal rise. The estimated growth for ERP, CRM and SCM solutions are expected to grow by 23-25 percent between 2013 and 2015. With opportunities galore, CDC Software hopes to strike right and capture a chunk of this pie. In a candid conversation with SmartTechie, Nagaraja Prakasam, MD, CDC Software India talks about company’s plan of action. How is CDC Software positioned in India? CDC Software India is the company’s biggest development center across the globe and with 75 percent of development work happening from here. At 250 strong workforce, a lot of innovation in the company’s product portfolio has been happening from the India center. These innovations majorly find their way in the US and other developed markets but many of our products are now paving in roads to Indian market. The prime focus in India has been the ‘Pivotal CRM’ offering since past seven years. 90 percent of the 6.0 version of Pivotal was being developed in India and taking it ahead, the next version would be 100 percent made in India. CDC Software wants India to be a profit centre from presently a cost centre. There is a big evolution in the customer services landscape across enterprises, as customers desire to provide more customer services and gain a competitive edge through CRM. The enterprise class feature set of CRM is expensive, but we provide enterprise class products at affordable points for verticals like FSI, Government. Other key focused offerings include Ross Enterprise –a suite of ERP for process manufacturers and CDC factory. Which are the major areas of interest for CDC Software? For CDC, the prime verticals of interest are those where governance, risk management and compliance (GRC) plays a major role. Hence, F&B (food and beverage) is the largest market globally since With FDA in the US and similar regulatory bodies in European countries keep a strict vigilance in terms of quality of food materials being imported into their country. Apart from this, process manufacturing which includes life sciences and steel and natural products, is the second largest market. Finally it is the BFSI sector which also sees GRC playing an important role. What are the challenges when venturing into Indian markets? In India the major challenge we find is the lack of stringent regulations. For example, in case of F&B there is not a standard regulatory body that keeps a vigilant eye on vendors, manufacturing units, retail chains and others. In such a case, when an emergency strikes, recall of a particular brand/batch of products is quiet a chaotic process. Hence, currently, we are in the process of evangelizing large retail chains and corporate houses in this sector about the advantages of deploying an ERP/CRM solution like ours. Secondly, the turn around rate of customers is quiet delayed here. A potential client may understand the benefits of deploying an ERP solution but there continues to be a lack of urgency amongst them. But this is a case majorly in the F&B segment. On the contrary, we have seen quite a traction in the BFSI segment. With the competitiveness amongst the major players increasing day by day, the differentiating factor amongst them is customer relationship/ retention and satisfaction. Hence, there has been a lot of demand for our CRM solutions. Currently we have about 18 clients in this vertical including ICICI, Max New York Life Insurance and more. How do you target the potential customers? The broad strategy is to appoint two to three specialized partners per product. We are identifying partners with strong domain knowledge across a particular vertical. We appointed 5 VARs across India who implement and also enhance our solutions as per customer needs. We are keen to align with partners who believe in enhancing the services business of their customers. For CRM, we have franchisee partner programs wherein we invest in small start up reseller companies. There is more commitment as these partners are more focused to work with single vendor. What are the future plans? We see huge opportunity in India as a market. With advent of cloud computing, we see a large potential in the SME segment. Apart from the existing verticals, higher education, wellness (preventive healthcare), e-governance (RTI) are promising areas of opportunity. We also hope to expand in terms of work force this year. In terms of product portfolio, we have lauched several new products and have been growing both organically and in-organically (through acquisitions). Since 2009, we have made three acquisitions and would be interested to do some more if the right opportunity presents. Additionally we have been making some minority investments of up to $3 million in promising companies that compliment our product portfolio.