Building a Made-in-India ERP Product Company: Ramco CEO Virender Aggarwal (Part 6)

Sramana: What is your market share of the Indian ERP market, and how does Oracle and SAP fit in?

Virender Aggarwal: I feel that we are getting 10% of the new business happening in the country. We see Oracle and SAP, and on occasion we will see Microsoft. We have not seen Flex at all. I don’t know what market share percentage Oracle and SAP have. SAP should be dominating the business, perhaps around 50%. I would suspect Oracle has around 20%.

Sramana: How big is the Indian ERP market right now? There are still a lot of businesses that do things by hand and do not have existing ERP systems. What is the size of the high-end ERP market?

Virender Aggarwal: I would imagine it is around $250 million to $300 million dollars.

Sramana: What is your growth rate?

Virender Aggarwal: We are running at $12 million to $15 million a quarter. We are at a point now where we need to sell outside of India. The good news is that we have started that.

Sramana: When I comes to your U.S. strategy, I liked that you have found a particular competitor you can dislodge with specific positioning, which is your positioning against Flex. That should provide concrete strategy. Going against Workday with global payroll is also a strong strategy, although it remains to be validated.

Virender Aggarwal: Many times we find that a local office in India is using our technology, and they will tell their parent company to take a look at what we are doing.

Sramana: How is the company financed?

Virender Aggarwal: Up to this point we have had some fairly big losses, but things are turning around now. The stock has doubled in price in the past six months. I am focused on increasing revenue. I am looking at ways to double or triple annual revenue.

Sramana: Are you focused on stopping losses?

Virender Aggarwal: Our focus is on growing rapidly. We will be advertising heavily and spending money on marketing. We should be profitable very soon, and then roll that money back in. We already do well in aviation, and we spend a lot of money on Google AdWords to maintain that. We will expand that strategy to cover other products soon. We will spend money on branding and on our partner ecosystem.

We are also expanding into some interesting areas. We have in-memory data processing like SAP HANA. There is a company with two million global employees in our office right now that is trying to figure out how fast they can run. They think that get run even faster than we are currently running using the in-memory processing. We believe that we have a unique range of products and that our time to leverage them is now. There is not an infinite time to get them to market before other companies start bringing out new capabilities.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Building a Made-in-India ERP Product Company: Ramco CEO Virender Aggarwal
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