ServeGen Building Customer Centric Solutions Date:   Sunday , July 11, 2010 Owner of a prestigious restaurant in Bangalore can track every minute details of each sales transaction that happened in his branch restaurants at his comfort in home by just logging into his computer. Earlier he was not able to do that and every time he had to travel to respective branches or ask his people to come to his house with all the details. Thanks to the revolutionary software from ServeGen, a provider of Point of Sales (POS) software which helped the restaurant to achieve this luxury. What started off as a simple Restaurant Point of Sale software has grown to include more sophisticated features such as Home Delivery, Inventory, and Hand-held interface for taking orders. Today they are one of the prominent providers of Point of Sales (POS) software aimed at Hospitality and Retail sectors in India. “Our clientele now is as varied as restaurant chains, Clubs and Food Courts. Recently, we have forayed into retail segment with the introduction of ServeGen Retail POS Lite Edition,” says AK Balan, CEO, ServeGen. With the rise in income levels in the great Indian middle class, their spending quotient is also increasing considerably creating huge opportunity for hospitality and retail sectors in India. In turn this has created a multibillion dollar opportunity in technology innovation in these sectors. Pulsing the opportunity ahead, the two veterans in the industry, New Jersey based Kumar Rangarajan, a graduate of IISc and a serial entrepreneur and its CEO AK Balan, a software product development expert with two decades of experience, founded the company in 2006 with an aim to get leadership position within this domain with innovative and customer centric solutions. What is intriguing is that the company is trying to bring in American style of customer service to small and medium Indian customers in the Hospitality and Retail sectors. Imagine, Satisfaction guaranteed, no-questions-asked-return-policy in Indian markets! "Though there are plenty of POS products available from technology giants like Microsoft, Oracle and more, our ability to reach out to a small restaurant chain and being able to cater to their needs differentiates us from big players," says Balan. Currently, the company is employing the traditional model of sales teams approaching clients directly. “But we are setting ourselves to be selling through Channel Partners as well as direct sales on the Internet with complete remote support to our clients within the next Quarter. “Currently, the company is catering to customers which are small to medium sized (with 10 to 30 outlets) Restaurants. But we are quickly leveraging our expertise in this sector and applying it in Retail sector which has a much larger market. We have built a customer base of over 100 clients in Bangalore, the IT capital of India, which gives us the knowledge base of customer needs, which is a huge asset,” says Balan. Till date in India the company has been able to sell their technology to some well known names such as Kamat, Nagarjuna and Bangalore Golf Club in Bangalore. “But we are excited about the success we saw in taking our technology to establishments such as Gullu’s Chaat. That shows our ability to bend technology in order to take it to the common man,” Balan points out. Currently, the company has a small team of about 20 people on board with the development team based in Chennai and Sales and Marketing operating from Bangalore. “We are looking at clocking Rs. 50 crores in sales in about three years. As of now we are growing at over 100 percent Year-On-Year domestically. However, we are eagerly looking at expanding to other geographical areas like the U.S., Europe as well,” concludes Balan.