May - 2009 - issue > Cover Story
SRYAS Adding Intelligence To Business
Jaya Smitha Menon
Monday, May 4, 2009
Consider this: Bell Canada, the leading telecommunications company in Canada was facing a challenge in terms of retrieving and analyzing data in their ORS (out right sales) division. The challenge they encountered was to bring in a unified system that handles all the data that surfaces out of the varied sources, systems, and processes. They needed one platform that can be relied upon and which would weed out the inconsistencies and irregularities that are bound to occur in separate varied sources and manual work.
The company approached Sryas to address this problem. Sryas implemented a lean BI platform that caters to everyone’s problems. “If you look at Bell Canada, they had SAP, custom developed ERP’s, and hundreds of applications and proprietary database that were running on different platforms. All these applications were running in silos and could not talk to each other and neither could they exchange data. We implemented our ANALANCE BI platform and within 3 to 4 months they were up and running with all the reports and analytics they needed,” says Ramesh. ANALANCE BI enabled Bell Canada to be much more efficient and responsive to the market.
Like Bell Canada, several customers of Sryas speak volumes about the business value they dervied by opting for Sryas’ ANALANCE. With domain best practices, proven deployment, quality assurance process, and risk management the company serves fortune 500 clients.
Started as a 5 member team way back in 2003, by Ramesh who left his cosy job in Selectica, (when the entrepreneurial spirit caught his mind) Sryas today has over 100 engineers working in the offices in New York, Toronto, and Chennai. With the key insights he has acquired over 20 years of experience working for Fortune 500 IT companies in North America - covering many industries including telecom, healthcare, insurance, banking, and manufacturing - he has positioned Sryas as a market leader in the BI segment. His vision has been instrumental in Sryas achieving various customer satisfaction and quality awards.
Sryas is today at an inflexion point. Though the industry is going slow in terms of recruitment, Sryas is recruiting skilled professionals to focus on providing quality products and services to the clients as their preferred technology development partner with the highest level of customer satisfaction. To keep up with the growth pace the company took a bold step by setting up its own facility in Chennai, with over 25,000 sq. ft. floor area. Earlier, they were operating from four different offices in Chennai. Sryas is now inaugurating the new expanded 5,000 sq. ft. facility on May 9, 2009. This is perhaps a true testimony of the company’s growth since it started in a small office space of 200 sq. ft.
How it all Started
Ramesh was keenly observing the industry. Though he started Sryas as a system integration company in 2003, soon he realized that the market for system integrators was getting crowded and hence was becoming less attractive. He was quick to understand the need for repositioning the company according to the market needs. The opportunity arose during one of its projects in automating the processes involved in a particular business unit of a leading manufacturing company. Ramesh and his team observed during the project design phase that the client needed a product configuration tool that allows their customers, sales staff, and design engineers to easily assemble and customize product solutions. During the development and implementation of the project, Sryas also realized that the client was dealing with incompatible systems and information was scattered at different locations in different formats. Some of them resided in ERP systems, while the others were in excel and other semi structured documents and other legacy systems. Gathering information from all these systems and providing analytics was a cumbersome process.
This made Ramesh and his team go back to the drawing board and start working on an advanced Web-based reporting product which would help the client in performing real time analysis from disparate systems. Over a period of time the advanced Web reporting system transformed into a business analytical tool with rich KPI based reporting capabilities and dashboards called ANALANCE Business Intelligence. Today Sryas competes with the veteran product in the business intelligence space like Cognos and Business Objects and Ramesh claims that his product has never had performance and scalability complaints from his customers. Gartner has also mentioned ANALANCE as a potential BI player in the Asia Pacific Market in their report - Market Trends Business Intelligence in Asia/Pacific, 2008 – 2009.
Market Moves
The exponential growth of data and a plethora of information emerging from disparate sources are increasingly becoming difficult to manage. At the same time, businesses are looking to derive meaningful insights by analyzing the heaps of data to their advantage. The primary and critical need to make meaningful information from data by extracting, analyzing, and interpreting the relevant information and providing real time access, helping an organization achieve faster decision making mechanism, boosting efficiency, and raising productivity leading to improved ROI have become imperative but are proving to be a herculean task.
“Today, organizations pay millions to the service providers to create a few simple reports within their existing ERP systems. ERP, CRM, SCM, and HRM are good at transactional reporting, but when it comes to BI reporting and analytics, a more cost-effective, easy-to-use reporting solution with superior analytics is required,” explains Ramesh. Hence, over the past few years the adoption of BI tools has increased rapidly. According to Gartner the Asia Pacific business intelligence software market will see a five year compound annual growth rate of 15.3 percent, reaching more than $510 million by 2012. The primary growth driver in the region is investments to manage risk and find opportunities to increase revenue and control costs.
Doing Business Intelligently
ANALANCE provides Web-based OLAP solution, that enables employees in an organization to create and share OLAP, relational, and XML based views, using SQL analysis services, office web components, Relational OLAP components, and designer reports. ANALANCE BI portal provides senior and middle management of businesses and public organizations with reporting and business measurement tools.
ANALANCE BI 1.0 Version was first released in August 2007. But soon Sryas realised that reporting and analytics only contributed to 40 percent of the overall business intelligence tool. To compete in the market it needed other tools like forecasting, what if analysis, and data mining tools to complement the existing product sets. ANALANCE BI 2.0 was released in May 2008 with all these toolsets.
Since the product was on the Microsoft platform and was prominently using Microsoft SQL Server 2005, they collaborated the product with other Microsoft tools like MOSS 2007, Office 2007, Microsoft ERP product lines like Microsoft Dynamics, Navision, Axapta, and CRM. These toolsets were collaborated with MOSS 2007 and it was available in ANALANCE BI version 3.5. ANALANCE BI 3.5 provided enhanced security features and also integration into active directory services. ANALANCE BI 3.5 also extended to support other databases like Oracle, DB2, Sybase, and My SQL.
There was also a need for easier reporting solutions for the SAP customer base. They started partnering with SAP channel and alliance partners for technology solutions and started working on bridging ANALANCE and the SAP platform. The latest release of ANALANCE BI 4.0 is fully capable and supports all versions of SAP BW and R/3 systems.
What differentiates Sryas in the market is that they simultaneously focus on the BI product development and its implementation and the product is sold at 40 -45 percent lower cost than its competitors. For example, says Ramesh, “When you implement the product of some big company for a customer, you will not be able to customize that product in sync with customer’s needs, because that product was built by a different company and the implementation is done by its resellers of SI partners. But at Sryas, we implement our product ourselves, which gives us an edge to do customization that suits all the business needs of our customers.” Moreover, our product can be integrated with any enterprise-wide solutions that already exist at our customer environment like ERP, CRM, and SCM systems running on any platform.
To complete the business intelligence cycle, the future version of ANALANCE will support features like planning, budgeting, and financial consolidation. The engineering team is working on open source tools to extend the current tool’s data mining capabilities. The future versions of ANALANCE will also focus on providing templatized solutions for verticals like manufacturing, banking, insurance, and telecom.
Sryas also has a dedicated pool of consultants with expertise in solution designing and development that can maximize customer benefits. This helps them deliver complete solutions and services for projects that span technology, platform, and solution consulting. The consulting team analyses the customer’s current architecture, business processes, IT initiative, maturity, and strategy and recommends, configures, and delivers the most appropriate services that will meet the organization goals and bring in maximum business benefits.
Focus @ India
The Indian BI market is growing rapidly, on account of increasing IT adoption across industry verticals, increasing competition, and globalization, bringing with it new business challenges. Indian enterprises are adopting BI and analytics solutions in an effort to overcome the challenges of competition and globalization, and in an effort to pave the way for increased revenue growth and profitability.
Sryas is keenly exploring the market in India. “In India we are basically concentrating on the BFSI, ITeS, manufacturing, telecom, retail, and health sciences sectors,” says Ramesh.
Ramesh has also plans to focus at tapping the IT opportunities in the SMB sector. Pointing to a recent study on IT budgets and SMBs Ramesh says that the SMBs consider only a conservative budget for BI initiative. The CIOs are ready to spend even 40-50 percent of their IT budget.
Most of the CIOs feel that a BI-implementation adds value to the organization well within 3-5 years and a whopping 50 percent feel that a BI/DW exercise in their organization has added tremendous value in 1-3 years of its implementation, thus dashing the common myth that the value addition gestation time period is painfully long in a BI/DW implementation.
Sryas understands that the strategy for SMBs is not only to take BI as a corporate performance management tool, but also to use advanced reporting and analytics for each business unit or even for each enterprise system like CRM, BPM, or any planning and budgeting software. As the product is well integrated with all platforms it is easy to collect data from CRM, BPM, management accounting systems, financial systems, and ERP and consolidate and analyze these data and provide meaningful information in the form of dashboards and scorecards to top management and all the business owners. Sryas is also working with several partners in the BPM, SFA/CRM, and ERP environment. “By partnering with Sryas and implementing ANALANCE BI for their reporting and analytics, our partners in the BPM, SFA/CRM, and ERP are able to distinguish themselves in the market from their competitors,” says Ramesh.
Life @ Sryas
Sryas believes that employees are the secret of the success for the company. Hence much effort is made to create and maintain a safe and healthy competitive work environment, which encourages personal initiative, teamwork through trust, and respect for fellow employees and enhances self-worth. The 25,000 sq. ft. facility in Chennai is built with the state-of-the-art infrastructure to ensure a healthy and competitive work environment. Employees serve the clients and meet their complete development requirements.
The company encourages a flat culture and hence does not maintain a hierarchy system. Employees are encouraged to come up with ideas, and if it is found interesting the company encourages him or her to invest time and money into the ideas.
Value added benefits make the Sryas compensation package an attractive offer for the right candidates, across all levels - entry, middle, and senior. The compensation package includes onsite customer delivery opportunities, exposure and interaction across different verticals, and practices and technologies.
Career progression of an employee is considered vital in the organization. Hence the company has made 50 hours of training per year mandatory for all employees. When technical sessions for upgrading skills help the employees improve the quality of the work, training on the soft skills help them in their demeanour and communication skills. As a product development company it is quite demanding with regard to the competence level. Trainers are brought in from across the globe to train the employees in improving their technical competence levels. Employees are also sent to client locations to understand the business aspects.
To encourage innovation, the company also rewards and recognizes employees who have made outstanding contributions and performed extraordinarily. Every year Sryas gives out awards in different categories like outstanding performer, best achiever, employee of the year, best project, best manager, and innovation awards amongst others.
Beyond work, the company encourages its employees to take time out from their hectic schedules for enjoyment. Once a year the company plans a three day trip to a tourist destination for all its employees with their family. Several sports and cultural events are also conducted during this trip. Apart from this, they celebrate the company Annual Day on Feb 1st every year, which also commemorates the inauguration of the Chennai facility.
Sryas believes in extending the personal and professional growth and achievements to the society. As a part of the social responsibility initiative, an employee is given additional monthly incentive if he or she adopts a child. The incentive is doubled if the child is handicapped.
For a relatively young company, Sryas has carved a niche for itself in the market. As an organization it is well structured with programs and processes to bring out the best in its employees. As he moves ahead, Ramesh has a clear roadmap for the company. Perhaps these are the reasons why the company has been able to beat the heat of recession. Sryas stands for ‘glory’, and true to its name it is well on its path to success and glory. Ramesh believes that going forward Sryas would be a trendsetter and ture to the company’s vision statement its employees are striving for Sryas to be the most dynamic technology company, creating innovative solutions that sets benchmarks for others to follow.
Panel
*Privately held software company providing Business Intelligence (BI) and configuration Technology Software
http://www.sryas.com"
* Market Presence
* Headquartered in US (Illinois)
* ODC in Chennai
* Branches in Canada and Germany
* Products
* Analance Business Intelligence
http://www.analance.com"
*Services
* Customized BI solution
* Configuration technology
* Collaborations & Integrations
* 50+ customers worldwide
* Enterprises, Government organizations, ISVs, and SI
* Serving Fortune 500 Clients
