BusIndia.com: Pioneer Who Brought Online Ticketing to India & Build the Realm Date:   Tuesday , March 29, 2016 Remember those old days when booking a bus ticket was no less than a nightmare, and how we used to gut standing in the long queue for hours leaving our important work! But thanks to the technology enthusiasts who brought ticketing online and took it to an all new level, today, booking bus tickets while on-the-go (all credits to smartphones) is as easy as slicing a cheese with a sharp knife. Though the industry is just a decade old and has witnessed several companies spur and die, it is just the few masterpieces that have survived the test of time and even fewer who are riding high on the success tide. One such eminent name that was born at the early eras of online ticket booking in India is 1995 founded Radiant Info Systems Ltd., which witnessed every dawn and dusk of the industry till date. Working on them, Radiant has emerged as the pioneer and leader in the online reservation system for the road transport corporation segment in India, and is credited with launching the first ever online bus ticketing system for Karnataka (KSRTC, NEKRTC and NWKRTC) way back in 2006, while most of world was still debating on its possibility. Today, this section of the company runs under the name BusIndia.com. \"Our solutions and portals have transformed the passenger management and passenger\'s experience in India. We were the first company to launch online booking and mobile booking for road transport segment in the country,\" proclaims a proud Venu Myneni, Chairman & Managing Director, Radiant. The company crafted an immaculate bus ticketing site called BusIndia.com that integrates Pan-Indian bus ticketing portal in partnership with Central Institute of Road Transport (CIRT), a Government of India undertaking. BusIndia offers integration of Bus, Hotel and Taxi booking for offering complete itinerary management across India. Formally launched in October 2013, Radiant today stands tall as the world\'s largest integrated online bus ticketing portal that brings together government and private bus transport operators across the country under a single window, thus facilitating users to plan their bus travel across Indian cities with ease. Giving You a Unique Experience India has a huge demand and potential for the Road Transport Travel Segment. Passengers are choosing organized travel through online portals and mobile apps, even for bus travels and hotel bookings. Being the only portal for interstate connectivity, BusIndia.com enables users to book trips and hotels, providing a full itinerary experience for the first time in Indian bus booking history. However, when the company started its first system, the passengers had no means to plan for their itinerary and journeys. Radiant\'s reservation solutions and portals have transformed the passenger itinerary management and experience in the country. Its ORS (Online Reservation System) Solutions have issued 140 million+ seats and revenues in excess of Rs.4600+ crore since 2006. \"Roughly this is six times more than the closet competition,\" affirms Venu. The company holds master franchise for ticket distribution and management across all distribution channels in major states in India and offers its services to 21 of the largest transport corporations stretching from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, since 2000 onwards. The interesting developments such as road infrastructure and buses are seeing a transformational change in India and the road travel is becoming truly comfortable and on par with the best global destination. The Indian Union and State Governments are also playing a pivotal role in providing the best infrastructures like roads, highways, and comfortable buses to transform the country. With these positive and encouraging developments, Radiant believes that it can see a tremendous growth with proper marketing and positioning. \"Our solutions have helped our existing client transport corporations to significantly increase their bookings and revenue. There is still significant headroom available for increasing the business at these clients. We are also adding new clients and increasing our coverage across India. All our regional sites, which we setup for multiple corporations, are already seeing very significant transactions and growth,\" explains Venu. Through BusIndia.com, transport corporations can offer tickets from multiple delivery modes including eBooking and mobile booking. On the other hand, passengers can avail information, reservation and itinerary planning services using the portal, as it is the first time a portal offers one-stop booking, and multi-trip booking for bus tickets across multiple transport corporations. It also offers first ever truly enterprise level loyalty management (BI Rewards) and wallet (BI Wallet) programs for bus ticketing. \"Our team and our domain expertise is our lifeline. We believe we are the best transport technology team and that has been the key reason for the success we have seen in the transport and e-Commerce domain,\" proclaims Venu. The Early Mover Advantage As an early mover, Radiant has been able to garner a substantial share of the business from the transportation industry. \"We have long term and extendable BOOT/BOO orders with our customers. In addition, our BusIndia.com portal with support from the central government partner will be positioned as one of the largest integrated portal for bus ticketing in India,\" claims Venu. Another significant and strategic advantage that provides an edge to Radiant over others who are new and inexperienced in the industry is its long term and guaranteed orders and its proven established products/solutions with its own IP, and is constantly improving its solutions, processes to evolve better solutions and services for its customers. In multiple occasions, Radiant has taken its solutions to other vendors and scaled the solution in terms of features, transactions and business. The ability to understand different geographical and location specific info and factors affecting the transport and travel provides Radiant an upper hand over competition. Radiant helps plan and setup the service, route management, customer support and offering comprehensive and user friendly transport itinerary management solutions. Over a period of time, it has also been able to collaborate with leading online travel agency portals in India. It also masters building the back-end systems and distribution platforms for the transport corporations. Once this system and portals are in place, it can distribute through its own portal, mobile apps, while other portals can partner with Radiant to work as additional selling channels. \"We therefore do not believe that we have major competition in the ORS back-end systems, which we put for transport corporations. The other travel portals can be collaborators and can help us to increase the business and transactions for our customers and increase the outreach and business bringing benefits for all stakeholders,\" explains Venu. The Tough Time Any large implementation system comes with its own challenges. So was Radiant\'s ORS. But an in-depth study of the segment before kicking off helped Radiant address the challenges effectively. \"One of the major challenges was to convince the client\'s management team on the need of such solution, preceded with the challenge to transition the clients from paper-based system to e-Commerce platform where things have to be defined and services have to be offered as per the service definition. Spicing it up is the challenge to make corporates to focus on the customer service management. We also found that passengers initially did not believe they can get the similar experience of their travel and itinerary similar to the airline industry in Bus Corporation in India,\" details Venu when asked about the challenges he faced while growing the company. Today, Radiant\'s solutions have redefined the entire itinerary management experience for the passengers and have seen other firms happily adopting its model to script their own success stories for the private bus operator segment too. The gradual decade long journey of experiment, innovation and success has enabled bus ticket booking industry to be a more user friendly, convenient mode by the passengers. With BusIndia.com portal and mobile app as its flagship products, Radiant is all geared up to offer booking for bus ticket, hotel and taxi from an integrated portal from the BusIndia platform. Today the company has aggregated the highest bus ticket inventory across India on a single platform. The company also holds years of experience in setting up and growing multiple regional sites across different geographies in India for multiple transport corporations in last one decade. \"This experience and expertise will help us to scale and position BusIndia.com as the leading online ticket booking website in India,\" asserts Venu. With the newly launched mobile app, the company is experiencing increasing business and expects significant growth thorough this medium in the coming days and plans to enhance its customer support management and process. Breeding the best talent, Radiant considers it human capital as one of its key strengths. It has developed a professional, talented and dedicated pool of trained employees who have the required skill sets and ability to manage and execute projects. \"Our organizational structure and unifying culture facilitates sharing of knowledge and best practices amongst our employees,\" asserts Venu. The open culture helps and creates environment for creativity and innovation, which has resulted in a very low attrition rate for the company and retained the core team successfully over the years who today are engaged in making Radiant the shining sword of the industry. Panel 1: Competitive Advantages & Differentiators • Pioneers, who introduced On-line reservation system to India’s road transportation industry • Largest inventory holder in India with both government and private bus reservations • Only company that can provide online bus reservations from Kashmir to Kanyakumari • Customised and Cost effective solutions • Cross selling of its service offerings • Global delivery model lowers job completion time ensuring higher productivity and healthier profit margins • Technology partnerships viz., Premier Business Partner of IBM, HP, Red Hat, Novell Platinum Partner Clients: KSRTC, BMTC, UPSRTC, GSRTC, OSRTC, PEPSU, RSRTC, Kerala KSRTC, Puducherry, Himachal Pradesh, Meghalaya ST, SETC, TNSTC, Kadamba (Goa), JKSRTC, Bihar RTC Office: Bangalore (Headquarter) Panel 2: Key Management: Venu Myneni, Chairman & MD A Master’s degree holder, Venu co-founded Radiant. Prior to this, he is the Board Member of NJTC and was Co-Chairman of CIO Council. Crowned with titles like ’40 under 40’, ‘Top 50 Asia Pacific Entrepreneurs’, and ‘E&Y Entrepreneur of the Year’ finalist, Venu brings over 30 years of extensive experience in IT, Marketing and Management. Vinod Koduru, Vice Chairman & COO With over two decades of experience in IT, Marketing and Management, Vinod co-founded Radiant along with Venu. His experience in running global operations over the period of twenty years helped BusIndia shaped up into a robust and dependable platform. Narayan. C, Co-founder and advisor Narayan is the co-founder of Radiant and is the master of wide experience that spans over three decades in handling and coordinating turnkey projects involving Hardware, Software, Data Centers and Enterprise Infrastructure Management.