Building a Made-in-India ERP Product Company: Ramco CEO Virender Aggarwal (Part 4)

Sramana: How big is the MRO business today?

Virender Aggarwal: That business does about $12 million a year and is growing rapidly.

Sramana: How big is the cloud ERP business?

Virender Aggarwal: In terms of revenue it is doing $5 million, but it is growing very rapidly to the extent that we have stopped selling on-premise solutions. It is growing about 43% per quarter. In the past six weeks we have started to make a push outside of India and we now and 12 clients in the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.

Sramana: Looking at those 12 clients you won outside India, who did you have to compete with to win those deals?

Virender Aggarwal: Most of the time the competition was Plex or NetSuite. In India we go head to head against SAP and Oracle. We have won eight deals against SAP. Most of the deals we run into we find our clients are tired of SAP and the amount of money SAP charges.

Sramana: Your primary competitive advantage against SAP and Oracle in India is price. What is your primary competitive advantage outside of India? NetSuite is a mid-market product, and it is not that expensive.

Virender Aggarwal: NetSuite is not that strong on manufacturing, so we compete well there. We have good manufacturing modules. Other products we compete with might be good at manufacturing, but they won’t have the HR or other modules we have. Our cloud ERP also provides end users an easy way to customize their products.

Sramana: I think you have an opportunity to position yourselves directly against other ERP products such as NetSuite and Plex.

Virender Aggarwal: I think our biggest opportunity lies in the HCM space. We have our own payroll for almost every country, and it is sophisticated. That is a large opportunity. We have not taken that outside India yet. I think we will be ready to take on others in that space. We will also do well where customers want an integrated environment. Perhaps Plex does manufacturing well like we do, but we offer more than they do.

Sramana: You mentioned that you are winning deals against SAP in India. That is interesting because SAP does have strength in manufacturing.

Virender Aggarwal: SAP requires hardware purchases as well as licenses. Our upfront costs are zero. Just the cost of hardware and networking for SAP is more expensive than a full year of our solution.

Sramana: Are you seeing good adoption in the Indian manufacturing sector?

Virender Aggarwal: Yes. We will get about 15 orders per month in India, many of which are fairly large organizations. They are global multinationals with retail stores in India. They find it extremely appealing to know that they only need network connectivity to use our product suite. They can run our entire suite from an iPad or an Android device. In fact, all of our new capabilities are built first for mobile, and then we build for the desktop.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Building a Made-in-India ERP Product Company: Ramco CEO Virender Aggarwal
1 2 3 4 5 6 7