point
Menu
Magazines
Browse by year:
March - 2012 - issue > Cover Story
Tiara Consulting Growing along with Partners
Hari Anil
Monday, March 5, 2012
A leading U.S. coffee manufacturer F. Gaviña&Sons, headquartered in Vernon, California, faced challenges in implementing an integrated technology solution to enable excellence in their Trade Promotion Management. Being a coffee manufacturer, they had limited technical bandwidth to pull this off on their own and being a SMB they need to keep a tab on their budget and could not afford to hire a big company to do this job for them. This is not just the case of one company, this is the trauma many small and medium businesses face in this changed world. In today’s cutthroat business environment any help a company can get in terms of business intelligence, trade promotion management solutions, customer relationship management or enterprise resource planning will be a blessing for their business. SMBs spend just over $2.9 billion in Business Intelligence alone in 2011, an enormous percentage of their total budget. All of the giant players have the ways and the means to spend mammoth amounts on technologies but what about companies like Gaviña — the small and medium players, which do not have tens of thousands of dollars to treat themselves with?

Gaviña was looking for a company who can help them. That is when they stumbled across Tiara Consulting. Tiara took on the project without any delay and it marked the beginning of a fruitful, mutually beneficial partnership.

Initially the company stepped-in to assist Gaviña with ERP SME (Subject Matter Expertise) in Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS). Through its proactive approach in delivering customer value, Tiara expanded its support to the business team in advising changes to business processes for adopting new technology solution and helped in implementing the integrated solution.Today Tiara is involved in advising solutions for handling complex brand management and trade promotion business scenarios and also, enabling excellence in their CRM systems for Gaviña.“The integrity of Tiara team and their strong knowledge and expertise has helped Gaviña to achieve impeccable results in the implementation of our trade promotion software,” says Marcia Ramos, Project Manager for Trade Promotion, Gaviña. Started in 2006 by V.A Venkatesh Babu, Tiara Consulting is a Global IT Consulting.

Started in 2006 by V.A Venkatesh Babu, Tiara Consulting is a Global IT consulting firm that specializes in delivering project based IT solutions and services in business intelligence (BI), CRM, ERP, business applications, quality engineering and emerging technologies. The company specializes in bridging the gap between business and technology through its ability to correctly understand the business processes and needs of their customers, and offering the correct solutions using BI, CRM, ERP and web technologies. The best part for SMBs is that the company is offering solutions tailor made for them, to fit their needs and constraints. “We are very clear on how we want to reach out to the customers and how we want to grow. Being a small startup, right now we cannot go ahead and market our products to Fortune 100 customers, doing that will be like trying to pull a mountain using a small rope. We are concentrating on smaller players who we can grow along with,” says V.A.Venkatesh Babu, Founder, President & CEO, Tiara Consulting.

The Beginning

When the company started back in 2006 it started as an ERP subject matter expertise provider. The management of Tiara knew the importance of trust in a company’s customer relationship; they also knew that this trust can only be built by offering impeccable services and the company concentrated on this. Time proved this to be the right strategy and approach.

By providing very high quality services the company managed to build the trust factor among its customers and that helped them to attain growth that could not be attained otherwise. The trust factor made their customers to start asking them to venture into more and more services. “When the demand came, we realized we have the potential to help our clients beyond ERP,” says Babu. The company has come a long way since that, and now it is nothing short of a premium offshore partner for product engineering, for many of its clients.

From its inception onwards Tiara flaunts a partnership based approach. This has helped the company so far in its journey. For example, it started as a consulting service provider for Pervasive Software, a leading data integration company based in Austin, Texas. Tiara earned the trust through its service excellence and process optimization, and transformed the business relationship into a long lasting partnership. Within the past three years, it has become one of Pervasive’s premium partners in several areas such as product engineering, quality engineering, product implementation and service support. All the services done for Pervasive and its customers are executed 100 percent from Tiara’s offshore development center in Chennai and thereby bringing cost effectiveness into the business equation. As a trusted partner, Pervasive relies on Tiara to develop new connectors and upgrades to existing ones on their proprietary framework. Presently Tiara is also the sole distributor and market development partner of Pervasive in India and helped Pervasive data integration products reach out and sell to some of the leading companies in the market. These customers include some of the large multinational banks and few of the giant BPO players in India. “Tiara’s strength in delivering high quality services with agility using a global / offshore model has helped to expand our business partnership into different areas,” says Lance Speck, VP and GM of Integration, Pervasive Software.

Cloud computing has opened up a sea of opportunities to companies wanting to embrace latest technologies. Arguably, cloud gave birth to SaaS, pay-as-you-go, and PaaS models and this has made many technologies affordable to the SMBs. But the issue is that, since the development and growth of cloud happened very fast, there are only a very limited number of players in this space. Yet, Tiara has already established its presence over the cloud and today the company is providing both on-premise and cloud based integration solutions and cloud based CRM solutions using Salesforce.com, Oracle CRMOD, NetSuite and MS?Dynamics. By providing services on the cloud the company is not just standing out among its competition but also is providing its customers all the advantages and flexibility that comes along with cloud.

The Tiara Advantages

In the past five years, the company has strengthened its capabilities by forging partnership with global leaders such as Pervasive Software, Oracle, RightNow, Salesforce, Microsoft, IBM, TALLY Solutions and grown its business multi-fold across diversified business segments and geographies with its corporate headquarters in San Ramon, California. It has offshore development center in Chennai, India,and business operations spread across U.S., UK, UAE (Dubai), Singapore and India.

The scarcity of IT solution providers is severely faced by SMBs throughout the world, yet it is more severe in growing economies like India. Indian SMBs struggle as not many companies provide services to the small players, all the providers are targeting MNCs that operate within the nation. Again, Tiara is a boon for them. The company’s main concentration is on the domestic market too. The services that it provides come with pay-as-you-go model and so are very affordable for the SMB players. “We understand the issues faced by the small and medium businesses in the country, we are committed to bringing value back to the country and are very focused on this,” says Babu.

The company also provides its customers with training in proprietary products. This is not a very common service that many companies provide to their clients. The advantage that Tiara is providing to its clients by doing this is unparallel. This also cements the already strong bond and trust between the company and its partners. The company believes in building strong relationships with its customers so as to develop long term partnerships with them. It provides utmost transparency in its conduct and its global delivery model comes with a cost advantage.

Since inception, Tiara has been focusing on serving the booming IT needs in India. Towards this, the company formed a long-term partnership with TALLY Solutions by becoming a TALLY Sales, Service and Integrator Partner. Within one year of the partnership, it won more than 25 TALLY customers in India. It was around this time that the automobile industry in India mandated that all the invoices from vendors have to be 2D barcode certified. Most of the vendors were using Tally, which did not have 2D barcode solution.The vendors had to comply with the mandate and were looking for companies who can provide this service for them. Tiara came as the sure winner in this situation as it is the first Indian company to build 2D Tally bar code. The company saw the need early on when one of its customers came and asked for help. With its prominent Tally development language expertise the company went ahead, did the research and developed it so that all of its customers can benefit. “We have also built web enablement for Tally. Now our customers can access Tally from any web application. This is the biggest driver for us to expand Tally project in India. Also we have a mobile application for Tally,” says Babu.

Word of mouth publicity comes as a byproduct of good customer relations and it has worked miracles for the company in its run. Many a times, its customers have introduced or referred the company to some of its partners who in time became the company’s clients. The main advantage for word of mouth publicity is that a level of trust is inherited by the new customer from the existing customer. Another key differentiation that the company provides to SMBs abroad is the onsite offshore model. Even though they want the cost arbitrage that comes with offshore partnership, most of the SMBs tend not to trust their work with players who do not have an onshore presence. With offices in California, Singapore, and India, the company has managed to take away this fear from many of its clients.

Customers can directly be in touch with Tiara’s office in their country and still get the benefits of off-shoring. This provides the clients with a sense of security. It delivers its services across the world in a global offshore delivery model with majority portion of the work delivered by our offshore delivery team located in Chennai, India. The company is also establishing their presence in the UK market thus enabling the trust factor in the Europe as well. More than that, it offers offshore model for projects as short as two weeks. Due to this, the customers can save up to 70 percent of the cost even for smaller projects. Not many players in the industry provide this.

Future

The company has been growing at major league pace since its inception and it is expected to continue in the future. It considers its dynamic, self-motivated group of professionals as its backbone and the management makes sure that this team stays happy and motivated. In order to ensure this, the top management spends a lot of time with the employees, understanding their needs, solving their issues and helping them in any aspect they might need help in. The organization flaunts a flat hierarchical culture, where an employee does not have to jump through the hierarchical loops to reach the senior management. An employee who wants to talk to the senior management can go ahead and do this in person or over email or phone. “This makes our employees feel comfortable and valued. They know that they are recognized as an integral part of the company and feel appreciated for the value that they are providing to the company,” says Babu.

The company believes in transparency and has made it a policy to reach out to the employees with the information of company’s growth. As the CEO, Babu sends a bimonthly update regarding the company’s growth and any other key updates to the employees. The management believes that this helps to keep the employees motivated and informed. Apart from competitive remuneration packages and great work environment, the company also provides its employees maximum opportunity to stay current and updated with the latest development in the industry. “This is an area I am focusing much on. I always make sure that our employees stay updated and get proper training in all the new and relevant technologies in the industry. We organize training sessions for our employees on a regular basis,” says Babu. All these factors have contributed in building the highly qualified, tightly knit talent pool that the company has today.

Tiara seems to have big plans for the future. The company has grown in an exponential pace so far and the management team is expecting this growth to continue in the future. “Our aim is to double our revenue every year. In fact, our budget this year is two and a half times our budget last year,” says Babu. The company also has plans to establish offices in Bangalore and Delhi this year.

Quick Facts

Founder : Venkatesh Babu, CEO

Founded : 2006

Headquartered : San Ramon, CA

Other Offices : Chennai, India & Singapore

Employees : 75

Customers : 55

Website : www.tiaraconsulting.com


Twitter
Share on LinkedIn
facebook