Biggies Apart
Also eyeing the BFSI space is Cranes, which went aggressive on an inorganic strategy. The objective was to reach a scale, a critical size. It went about with a series of M&As, purchasing toplines, so that it can be perceived as a more serious player in the scientific and engineering community. In the process, it de-risked its model by reducing time spent on creating a product scratch up. It acquired undervalued products, rejuvenated it scratch up, went to pressure markets, and made them available across the world. The acquisitions-of Texas-based InventX (which add to Cranes' portfolio a comprehensive suite of integrated project management applications); of Karna (which gives it a head start in the banking and financial services vertical); of EMRC (developer of the NISA suite of products and a pioneer in the field of Computer Aided Engineering); of Capella (business and reporting product)-besides allowing the company to enter the enterprise space, will permit it to give solution-based approach to customers, rather than a tool-box solution.

Among other enterprise players, 3i Infotech's Orion suite of ERP received acceptance in the Middle East and in North Africa, where it currently is the third largest vendor in terms of revenue behind SAP and Oracle. Ramco, who is after the SMB segment, made good in-roads into auto ancillaries, manufacturing, garments, food and chemicals. In the enterprise segment, it has been focusing on providing packaged and as well bespoke solutions primarily to the large corporates, BFSI, government, and the services segment. It has witnessed significant momentum with solutions delivered using VirtualWorks-its proprietary process to application platform.

Accounting pin-up Tally is also targeting the ERP space but managed to create a bit of difficulty for themselves by delaying the launch of two of its most important announcements-multi-lingual versions and an ERP solution- hinting that it is not being able to strike the right balance between the pace at which it is growing and the pace at which it is able to bring in operational efficiency to meet project timelines. The company moved rapidly from being a 100 people organization to its current strength of almost 1,000.

Number of users went up by 30%, but in terms of pure revenues, Tally did negative growth as it dropped prices by almost 50%. In the exports market, the firm's story took off in the Middle East, where it has shown six times the turnover from what it used to be earlier.

On the market front, Tally's challenge still remains the footprint of availability-there are approximately 25,000 people who service the small enterprise market through hardware, software and services. It has been able to mobilize 4,000 of them so far. It expects to mobilize another 5000 in FY 2007. The company will, therefore, take two years before it gets the spread and without this, it will never be able to solve the supply problem.

Supply and finance are also sensitive problems for start-ups, especially since there is little angel funding available in India. And even if money comes, there are very few people with the ability to advise start-ups, connect them to entrepreneurs, with prospective key customers, key employees, with lawyers. In FY 2006, help came for lucky some from an unexpected source: Microsoft. It provided innovative companies valuable resources, from exposure to the V-C community to its technology; and at times, even marketing help. Recently, it got a bouquet of companies to pitch in for 20-25 minutes before Dan'L Lewin, corporate vice president, DPE Division, a mouthpiece to the reset of the V-C community in the Silicon Valley and someone who holds an annual event called the 'VC summit'. India found a window when chairman Ravi Venkatesan went over to pitch India at the event last year, talking about a number of companies who were sort of representatives from the country.

Goutam Das
goutamd@cybermedia.co.in

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