workXmate – A cloud based ERP and On Demand SaaS App ecosystem for SMEs

Product Nation interviewed Kamal Mansharamani and Atul Bhatia, founders of workXmate – a cloud based ERP & CRM solution designed for SMEs. During the discussion, they share their insights on how technology and external environment changes are creating favorable opportunities for tech entrepreneurs to offer products to the market. Read on…

Can you tell us about your background and motivation to start workXmate?

Both Atul and I have been in the software product and services industry for over 2 decades now. We were part of the senior leadership team at DCM – one of the earliest product companies operating out of India. After our stints at DCM each of us has dabbled in to starting our ventures. Atul set up nSys which was a niche player in the verification IP and chip design space. nSys became a market leader within a short span of time, which led to its acquisition by Synopsys. I joined Birlasoft’s leadership team and led its transformation from a 400 member team to about 5000 people over a 7 year span. Post that, I started a startup AlmaMate Info Tech that focused on making graduates employable. I gained great experience running it.

A couple of years ago, we scanned the marketplace searching the next big opportunity that we could work up on. We converged on the resource planning and automation space for SMBs as the segment to target. This was driven by two factors; one by our own past experiences where we faced difficulties to chose the right ERP tool for our startups and second – the technology and globalization changes that are affecting the SMBs. Both of these convinced us that we should provide a practical and effective solution in this space – and this led to setting up of workXmate Technologies.

Could you elaborate a bit more on how the technology and globalization changes are affecting SMBs, and how does your product help SMBs to deal with these?

Cloud as a technology change has a huge impact on SMB sector world wide. Due to provision of computing services with no upfront investment, it is most attractive to cash strapped SMBs. Also due to the maturity and acceptance of Cloud, most SMBs are now looking to leverage this disruption to their advantage. On a different note, due to liberalization of Indian economy and the proliferation of Internet in India, SMBs operating out of India now have to compete with global players. This has forced them to consider efficiency enhancing solutions.

Our product helps customers to leverage the benefits of cloud based deployment. However, the key differentiator from competition is that our product actually integrates functionality of all point solutions which SMBs use across different departments and offers the same capabilities at affordable costs. Usually, we find most customers managing all their work processes using Tally and excel sheets. workXmate has Apps like CRM, HCM, Project Management, Inventory, Knowledge Management and Intranet seamlessly integrated and working on a single database with a single login. Due to the globalization pressures, as SMEs look to optimize their work activities, our product becomes a compelling proposition.

Great insights! How has your experience been, selling to the initial set of customers and what learning have you had thus far?

We have got off to a very good start, clocking about 25 customers in our first quarter since we formally launched our product. We also have about 50 more customers in the pipeline. The quick ramp up of customers for the product is a good validation of the value that our product provides to our customers. Secondly, it also validates our business model of targeting the services based companies to begin with. We are able to convert most of our leads to paying customers due to our deep understanding and prior experience in services sector. Also, due to the nature of work in the services sector, these segments of customers tend to be more tech-savvy and need to adapt to new technology solutions at a faster pace.

We also realize that all customer acquisition cannot be organic. Hence we are actively looking out for partners and alliances to help proliferate our offerings to the wider market.

Good to hear about your increasing customer base… What are your future plans for the product and the company?

We first want to establish ourselves firmly as the vendor of choice for the Indian SMB customer segment. The next logical step for us is to start selling in International markets. We are studying about the changes we need to make to suit or incorporate geography specific practices in to our product. We expect to target all English speaking countries as part of the first phase of selling abroad.

Excellent! In closing, would you like to provide your thoughts to fellow product entrepreneurs operating out of India?

As product entrepreneurs operating out of India, we believe that these are very exciting times for us. We have a great opportunity to build truly global products, thanks to the globalization and advent of new technologies which provide a level playing ground to entrepreneurs across the world. We would like to be the enabler of success to thousands of small businesses and start-ups as they embark on leading our country to further prosperity.

07/02/201407/02/2014

ClinchPad is rethinking the sales tool for small enterprises.

Delhi has stereotypically been the startup city of deals and hustlers. Infamous for people who tend to prize their ‘contacts’ and somehow this fits right into the grand scheme of things that the online sales CRM ClinchPad is based in the capital city.

About

Started by Cheenu Madan, ClinchPad is a SaaS based product aimed at small teams and organizations to help effectively channel and manage their sales lead. Part of the GSF Accelerator ‘13, the name ClinchPad ( Clinch + LaunchPad ) simply stands for ‘grabbing a deal’

Product

On using the product, the landing screen greets one with a card like interface stacked one below the other. For the keen eyed observer it is definitely reminiscent of Trello ( the organizational tool ), but that is not a bad thing. The interface does aid usability especially for a desktop environment. With a pipeline layout which lays emphasis on leads. The user begins by moving their contacts between the various stages of the sales ( beginning from a prospect going all the way to negotiation & closing ). The sales incharge can add meta data to the lead in the form of to-do, collaborators, value of the sale and in the end mark it as won/lost. Enough points for future benefits of individuals and their teams.

ClinchPad integrates with Google and in an attempt to get rid of the cumbersome methods currently used, one can upload their csv/excel sheets with the product. According to the team the ‘reports’ and the ‘summary emails’ are one of the most popular sections which help the managers to scan through their team’s effort faster.

The product is simple to use with a basic learning curve. Certain sections like the integration with Google need more visibility and we personally discovered it only during the walkthrough with the team. In a mobile-first world, the offering on that front also seem a little weak. But the ‘summaries section’ mentioned above and the ‘apps timeline’ mentioned below make up for it now.

Users

ClinchPad is currently being adopted by a diverse set of people such as the freelancers, marketing agencies and real estate firms amongst other, with a unifying theme that they are involved with sales in one form or the other. Though the Western audience remains the prime target group, the product has seen adoption from smaller Indian cities.

Pricing

At the heart of any SaaS product lies the pricing. ClinchPad boasts of a genuinely enticing onboarding plan. The service is free-to-use for the entire team as long as the number of leads and the usage are within the limits of 100 and 250mb respectively. On the paid side the plans go from as low as $9/month ( 1 user and 2gb storage ) upto $99/month ( 33 users and 20gb storage ) all the while offering unlimited leads.

Competition & Timeline

ClinchPad is in no way the only company trying to crack the CRM sector. Even in the products catering to small and medium enterprises the competition from names like Pipedrive & Highrise along with the desi Zoho and its suite of products is there.

A less known fact about ClinchPad is that they already have an iPhone app in place, much less publicized though. The core focus for the coming months for the ClinchPad crew is to push out their apps by covering more platforms and changes to their web app.

The value of a sales tool lies in the integration it brings to the fold. The team is already in work to integrate the ClinchPad with some of the most popular business offering out there. One shouldn’t be too surprised to find it being a part of our favorite online form builder to email marketing service in the near future.

We’d love to know your experience with the product. For those of you who have not yet invested in a sales tool, the free plan for ClinchPad is great way to feel things out and experiment with it. If for nothing else, their blog is worth a special mention!

21/08/201315/08/2014

“We are getting the world to gain confidence on enterprise products developed out of India” – George Vettath, CEO of Kallos Solutions

ProductNation interviewed George Vettath, Founder and Managing Director of Kallos Solutions to learn about the journey of his company in the Enterprise software space for the past decade. In this interview, George explains how his background and experience helped in creating a superior product, and provides useful tips for entrepreneurs in this space to get more effective. Read the full story here….

What was the motivation to start your company?

I had been working in the enterprise software space for over 16 years prior to taking the entrepreneurship leap. Around 2003, I was fascinated by the model based development – a technological innovation that started emerging in rapid software development. I immediately recognized an opportunity to leverage this new model, using which I could reduce time to value to a customer by five fold. Besides this, at that time, I had a different point of view on the direction of strategy with my employer. Both of these led me to start Kallos in India.

Why did you choose India as a location?

First, I wanted to give back to my country that helped me get global exposure, via sponsoring of my MBA at Sydney University, Australia. Secondly, my initial working years were spent at CMC and RAMCO Systems, during which I had developed a good understanding of the needs of the Indian customer. Thirdly, my roots and extended family are here. All of these were principally responsible in my decision to start my venture in India.

Starting a new company in the enterprise space, under conditions that prevailed a decade ago should have been very challenging. What gave you the confidence to pursue this path?

Like I mentioned earlier, during my professional career, I was already exposed to the nuances of dealing with Indian and global customers. I was part of the core team at RAMCO which was tasked to build its ERP product. Further, as global head of product management, I was given the responsibility to broaden the reach of RAMCO products to 8 different countries. The experience of selling these products in different geographies, dealing with competition – primarily SAP that came in to Indian market and virtually uprooted us, reconfiguring our strategy to survive the onslaught of global vendors, was the primary source of my confidence. I realized that I could still make my mark, despite all the heavy competition, as long as I had a sustainable competitive advantage against all these vendors.

Can you tell us on how you could translate your thoughts into a real sellable product – and one with a competitive advantage, over the past decade?

From 2003 till about 2006, we focused on building the product suite on the principles of model driven development. I bootstrapped the company during this period, by executing US projects on the side. From 2006 onwards, we started aggressively reaching out to customers and began delivering product centric solutions, based around the PaaS infrastructure that we had developed in house. The business model was to keep the PaaS in-house, but leverage the platform to deliver rapid solutions and customizations, around our ERP/CRM and HRMS products. Thus, we differentiated ourselves with others in the marketplace as providers of product and platform centric customized solutions, delivered within relatively short timelines.

Another aspect to note is that we did not concentrate on hyper growth. We took a very long term view on the road to profitability – knowing fully well that as the product matures, growth will follow. We also did not adopt aggressive marketing tactics. All we did during the past decade was to wait for a disillusioned customer tap our door after he or she had burnt their fingers trying to adopt a MNC vendor based solution and failed. I realized that the most difficult area in the Enterprise suite implementation is in addressing the variance of requirements across customers in their respective supply chains. Here, we leveraged our development strength to rapidly customize solutions as per customer requirements. These aspects have enabled us to sustain the edge against competition over the years.

Interesting insights… Can you share to us your moments of wins during your journey thus far?

We have provided solutions to over 170 plus customers thus far – and each one is an important milestone in itself. If I need to recollect the ones that had most impact to the organization, I would think the win we had at CSS Corp for our CRM solution, and wins at Bluedart Aviation (subsidiary of DHL), Scope International (Subsidiary of Standard Chartered Bank) and many services based BPO Organizations for our HRM solution as the key ones. Some of our international wins from the KGK group in Hong Kong and LCC in the Middle East for KServeHRMS, are also milestones since it was the early international sales of our products. The CSS Corp win validated our PaaS play, as well as demonstrated that our solution could scale to support a workforce of 400 users as early as 2007. The Blue Dart Aviation, Scope International and BPO HRMS wins gave us confidence to ramp up KServeHRMS as our current flagship product.

The KGK Group in Hong Kong initially bought the HRMS package for deployment at one of their offices – but after successful implementation there, they expanded to roll it out in many of its group companies in the Far East. An e-publishing firm in Delhi, Aptara Corp was able to effectively use the operational workflow automation solution for its 1100 employees. Power2SME, a Delhi based SME aggregator standardized on our ERP offering and went on to get funded on account of our backbone solutions. These are some experiences that I can recollect…

Over the years, you also would have your share of lost opportunities. Can you shed light on a few key ones?

As regards to lost opportunities, I think we focused initially on selling KServeCRM and KServeERP instead of KServeHRMS. We realized a bit late that the gap in the market was really in the HRMS space in India. We had the best in class HRMS solution and even those customers who had deployed MNC based solutions had not availed of the HR part for a variety of reasons.

The second one in terms of missed opportunity would be our lack of focus on going global earlier. International product sales are more profitable since they are tax free, and easier to implement due to maturity in their processes. In fact, the global customers that we have today – all of them came to us directly based on the good feedback and performance of our products in the field.

Having traveled the road thus far, what advice would you like to give to product entrepreneurs operating out of India?

Over the years, I have seen many companies start off and then shut down. While the reasons of closure could be many, I would advice all product entrepreneurs to have a proper focus on cash flow management and customer management, especially if you are addressing the domestic market. Software is not something that is understood fully by customers in India, and so, you need to work on getting them to understand the hard work that you are putting in to make them successful. Once they see the intent and integrity, customers will never hesitate to pay.

On a related note, personally, I spend about 2 to 3 hours every week for the startup and product ecosystem. I also aggregate the key challenges faced in this region to the appropriate policy makers in my capacity of being the Regional Chair for NASSCOM Emerge Forum for the past 2 years. I feel that over the past two decades a bunch of like minded folks have provided confidence to the world that we can conceptualize, build and sell enterprise products out of India. I urge all the fellow entrepreneurs in this space to reach out to us, collaborate and ensure that we take this momentum forward, and to greater heights.

29/11/201210/12/2012

Dont Take Usage For Granted

Buying vs usage: I read a mention of usage rather than just purchase and it is a very valuable distinction. Let’s focus on that and go deeper in it.

Buying does not necessarily lead to usage and I’m being generic here, spanning genres of products. Let’s look at a simple and very common example of a purchase that seldom leads to usage. It is the vacuum cleaner at residences. All of us have a desire to keep our homes clean and so when we see an ad or see a demo of how this gadget can contribute to a clean house, we buy it. Touch your heart and answer “How many times have we used it during its lifetime?”. We in fact have two, one local and another of foreign origin bought when we were abroad. Both of them are gathering dust (pun intended) in the loft.

Let’s look at another purchase of running shoes, bought with a very good intention of staying fit and healthy. Branded ones like Reebok or Nike cost quite a bomb but we do not pay much attention to it. To buy it is very easy but to use it calls for getting up early in the morning, cleaning up, wearing a suitable attire, wear the shoes and go for a jog or for a run, all of which is quite tiresome even to think of, leave alone doing consistently.

Human beings are a creature of habit and we carry our personal tastes and preferences to our work as well. So when we read about a productivity enhancement tool that appears relevant to us, we jump in anticipation of lesser work and more results. Then we go in for a CRM or SFA with mobile modules as well in addition to other bells and whistles. Mind you, I’m not talking of SaaS or non-SaaS in this context.

And then reality sinks in. Most of us do not even have a decent database of our customers or an established sales process and so it takes a while to get them on and map them to the software. Assuming, we do that diligently, it calls for Management focus and emphasis to keep it going on a daily basis. I’ve worked with bosses for whom reviews mean only one thing: chewing up people whenever they feel like and I’m sure each one of us have had such superiors who had their own whims and fancies. People need to be trained and re-trained. And when it is month-end or quarter-end, all hell breaks loose and everything is given a go-by including the systems. And by this time, the champion of the application would have left or moved elsewhere and then it dies a slow death.

Vendors like us have a big role to play in getting our products used regularly and that starts with the ease of use within the application, training, support and hand-holding in the initial phases, regular follow-up, introduction of new facilities to name a few. Now the SaaS lobby will cry in joy and say that all that is inbuilt n SaaS and more so because our existence depends on people using our apps regularly. While there is some merit in that argument, it presupposes that people stop subscribing if they do not use regularly, which is flawed inherently.

Look at the newspapers that we subscribe at home or office, the post paid connections for mobiles, broadband, cable TV or DTH connections for example. If we look at the usage (which incidentally we never do), we would find that it is probably 10% or even worse but still we continue to subscribe to them, with a hope that we will do so sometime in the future, when we have the time and leisure (which we will never have). And let us remember that it is our personal money that we are being so casual with. What to say about spending organizational resources which are anyway budgeted for?

There would be a review only when there is a calamity or a huge resource crunch and even then the cuts would be symbolic like replacing clean towels in the wash rooms with low quality unbranded tissues, reducing the number of coffee / tea per employee per day or downgrading the transport facility from cabs to mini vans. Rarely would someone do an audit of the usage of the on-demand apps and demand that the subscriptions be stopped.

So let us not be under the illusion that in-premise software is merely a sales or purchase transaction whereas the SaaS model is relationship-driven. The converse is also true because it is about the philosophy of the vendor not the delivery model.

I’ve worn my pads and abdomen guards in anticipation of a mounted attack!!

Post Contributed by Badri Narayanan V S, NRich Software