Building a Made-in-India ERP Product Company: Ramco CEO Virender Aggarwal (Part 3)

Sramana: Where did the cloud based ERP portion of the business come into play?

Virender Aggarwal: In 2007 one of the groups in the company was able to form a team to start building ERP in the cloud. That team grew to 80 people and built a multi-tenant cloud ERP product. That product started selling into the market and we have 400 installations in India today.

Sramana: What year did the cloud ERP product launch?

Virender Aggarwal: The first product came out for sell at the end of 2007. The sales process really got going in early 2008.

Sramana: Was India the target market for this product?

Virender Aggarwal: Yes, it was the Indian market.

Sramana: What was the price point when they started selling it?

Virender Aggarwal: It was around 3,000 rupees per month.

Sramana: What modules did the product have?

Virender Aggarwal: It had the basics of everything including manufacturing. It just had the core features, but in those features it had the same size and scope as SAP. Meanwhile, in 2003, the company also went into aviation and started doing the MRO work and started selling that as a product in a separate division in 2004 and 2005. That became mildly successful and today they are the third largest provider in the world.

Sramana: Was that specifically focused on the aerospace industry or were they focused on other industries as well?

Virender Aggarwal: It was specifically focused on the aerospace industry and it was specific to aviation. They captured all of the helicopter operators in the US. Anybody who had more than 200 helicopters was captured. Now they are getting a lot of interest in the fixed wing business as well. That is a unique area and strength.

Sramana: How did the business go from a cloud based business to an MRO business? Did they take what was going on in the cloud business and build the MRO on top of that?

Virender Aggarwal: No, they were separate initiatives and products. The cloud product was built in 2007 and started rolling out in early 2008. The MRO product started with some projects in the MRO field and evolved into a product. That actually started in 2002. When an aviation company got ERP implemented in Portland they kept asking for more and more things which were specific to the aviation industry.

That is when the company realized that they were building another product with a whole different set of capabilities. The MRO product is still being developed today and has become a very comprehensive product. From a code base perspective it has become larger than ERP. They have written their own financials and HR programs. They no longer use anything from ERP in their deployments.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Building a Made-in-India ERP Product Company: Ramco CEO Virender Aggarwal
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