Gurgaon based Emkor Solutions, has been trying to disrupt the ERP market for the SMBs segments. It recently developed a unique service offering “LiME – Life Made Easy” over Microsoft Azure Cloud.
With the new solution, the company aims to transform the way SMBs around the world are operating right now. In a chat with Channeltimes Vikram Dham, MD & CEO, Emkor Solutions, he described how ERP providers such as SAP have traditionally focused on technology for large enterprises, the SMBs have been grossly overlooked.
Excerpts…
CT: Microsoft recently appointed you as one of the cloud service partners (CSP) for its cloud offerings. Could you explain how this partnership would help Emkor to tap the new business opportunities and what is your product roadmap for this alliance?
Vikram: As a CSP Partner, we are able to deliver our unique service offering “LiME – Life Made Easy” over Microsoft Azure Cloud. With LiME, we aim at transforming people dependent businesses to process centric organizations with best-of-breed technology platform and standard industry practices. Today, SMBs are facing immense competition from the peers and big market players apart from combating their internal inefficiencies. So, the need of the hour for them is to focus more on their core – what gives them a competitive advantage. LiME helps these companies focus more on their core and gives them a perfect platform where they can easily streamline and strengthen their business operations.
Microsoft Cloud “Azure” will help us to deliver greater value to the SMBs and hence penetrate the untapped SMB segment that is grossly overlooked by the large technology players. Cloud USPs like cost sharing across customers, Pay-as-You-Go pricing, scalability, flexibility, robustness and reliability will help us develop a traction into our target segment and deliver value to multiple customers over a standardized platform. LiME integrates business critical functions like Finance, Production, Procurement, Sales accompanied with HRMS and Project Management System to deliver a complete Business Management Suite.
Talking about the roadmap for this alliance, we are enhancing the integration capabilities of LiME with O365, a Microsoft cloud offering for collaboration and office tools. We are also launching LiME Mobile App and CRM so that Indian SMBs can access business critical data on the go. Our main motive is to build a business focused application where the customers need not worry about intricacies of technological aspects in contrast to inward looking software like ERPs.
CT: SMB segment has been a key focus area for Emkor, what all integrated solutions do you have for the SMBs market?
Vikram: We aim to transform the way SMBs around the world are operating right now. SMBs need a solution that is built on best-of-breed technology and can help them focus on their business’s core imperatives. LiME offers a single platform to manage the entire business and covers areas such as Finance & Accounts, Production, Procurement, Sales, HRMS, Project Management, CRM and O365 for communication & collaboration. It is a vertical-specific solution meant to deliver the best industry practices for efficient business management and enhancing business operations. Currently, we are focusing on trading and distribution, manufacturing and professional services verticals.
What SMBs really need is an integrated technology and service offering (kind of a productized service) – a service delivery that leverages powerful technology platform. Emkor’s Business Function as a Service (BFaaS) offers end-to-end outsourcing of complete Business Functions through tie-ups with professional outsourcing partners. With BFaaS, Emkor’s partner ecosystem delivers value added services to businesses leveraging the automation capabilities of LiME platform to manage end-to-end business functions such as Finance & Accounts, HR, Payroll and IT. Soon we shall be adding more to this list.
CT: Presently, how many of your SMBs customers are using cloud based solutions. What are the trends of adoption of cloud solutions taking place in SMB?
Vikram: We launched LiME towards the end of 2014 and are receiving positive feedback from the market. We added 12 new customers in a span of 3 months and are gearing up to disrupt the market more aggressively in the coming months.
What we are bringing into the market is not just a process revolution or a service innovation, but we are executing strategic innovation and bringing a paradigm shift in the way vendors and service providers deliver product and services today. Our aim is to become a 100% outcome based service provider over time to come.
If we talk about the current cloud adoption trends in SMBs, research suggest that the public cloud services market in India is expected to grow about 33% to touch $838 million by the end of this year. Small and medium businesses present a lucrative opportunity of $11.6 billion in 2015 and $25.8 billion in 2020 for SMAC technologies. Cloud is making technology adoption in SMBs feasible and affordable which otherwise was out of their reach due to capital intensive on-premise options. Cloud adoption is also being fueled by features like flexibility, scalability and data security.
CT: How are your solutions gaining ground, when there are multiple similar solutions available from the competitors?
Vikram: From the way we see, currently we have no competition at all. ERP providers typically offer solutions meant for large enterprises. However, SMBs’ needs are different. Selling an ERP product to an SMB is like selling an engine to someone who wants a car. Factors such as high implementation cost, time, high risk, resource involvement are not suitable for SMBs. Hence SMBs have no choice but to opt for local accounting packages such as Tally, Quickbooks, Busy or so called ERPs that are inconsistent and cater only to a part of business. LiME will be a game changer in the SMB segment by empowering them to compete with the best in the world and combat their operational inefficiencies. 0 day deployment, easy user interface, zero upfront investment, no maintenance cost, zero risk and end-to-end integration of entire business functions are our USPs.
Immense competition from global players in national as well as international markets is also a big challenge to SMBs and only a few of them are able to sustain and survive. Inefficient business operations and relying on trust based operations are major setbacks in the growth of SMBs. Our platform keeps those needs in mind and offers a risk free solution available to the SMBs in 0 day deployment at Pay-As-You-Go model. The maturity of our cloud model is one of the strongest forces in disrupting the traditional IT consumption model eliminating the need for businesses to buy, deploy and maintain any IT infrastructure.
CT: While addressing SMBs, what are the challenges that you witness?
Vikram: The Small and Medium scale enterprises (SMEs) play a crucial role in the socio-economic growth story of India accounting for more than 45% of the manufacturing output and around 40% of the total export of India as of 2012-13, according to the annual report of Ministry of MSME. SMB market is beset with many problems like highly unorganized and fragmented supply chain inefficiencies, competition in both local and global market, internal thefts, loss of data and more. Our experience with SMBs reveal that absence of structured data is a major hindrance in their growth story. In this scenario, SMBs need to focus more on their core and adopt industry best practices to gain competitive advantage. They need a system that can curb the thefts and losses and offer greater controls and visibility. ERPs attempt to solve their inefficiencies and data problems but at a very high cost, high risk and lengthy time period.
Easy to use cloud model enables SMBs to adopt business applications without large capital expenditure, lower TCO and without being concerned about management and technical expertise required. This is exactly what LiME has to offer to SMBs.
Moreover, today SMBs need greater control and analytics to achieve the desired growth. Accounting software can barely address their growing needs. SMBs need to focus more on their core to combat the stiff competition. Neither ERP nor accounting packages suffice to meet these demands of the SMBs. Thus Emkor has partnered with leading service outsourcing partners who will deliver their services on top of LiME Platform. BFaaS, as we call our offering, is 100% Partner Driven Model to provide outsourcing Services over LiME Platform. With BFaaS, businesses can focus more on their core while our partners such as F&A outsourcing companies, HR outsourcing agencies take care of all the non-core activities.
CT: How is Emkor making progress in the cloud, what all alliances do you have? What has been the growth in last two years?
Vikram: Cloud is making it possible for us to offer benefits such as cost sharing & flexibility to customers that will help us penetrate deep into SMBs. We launched LiME in late Q3 2014-15 and since then, we are adding customers every month as we continue to learn from each of them. We are currently tapping new customer base within our current verticals of trading & distribution, manufacturing and professional services. With an aim to not only tap tier 1 cities but also penetrate into tier 2 and tier 3 cities, we are partnering with channel partners that will help us increase our geographic reach. We are also partnering with outsourcing partners to provide value added services on top of LiME platform. Such partners will manage end-to-end business functions of our customers. We are also exploring partnership with global firms to take LiME overseas.
CT:Could you share your expansion plans for 2015 in terms of products, channels and alliances?
Vikram: In 2015, we will continue to focus on our current verticals and enhance the product’s capabilities through micro-verticalization. We will also add on more features to LiME and drive more integration capabilities with O365. We will also LiME CRM, mobile app and the next phases of HRMS, PMS and more.
Initially we had been focusing on Delhi NCR and Bangalore to test the market response. Now we are expanding our reach to other Tier I and Tier II cities through partner network that comprises of F&A and HR KPOs, Analytics firms, O365 Partners and IT channel partners. Our trading & distribution vertical is already set to cater to the Middle – East market as our first step in overseas expansion.