"One product can't do it all"
Nov 20, 2006

Vishal Grover, President & CEO, SYSTIME, talks to Praveen Kurup about partnering with both SAP and Oracle, his experiences with the Indian mid-market and more...

How active are you in the Indian mid-market?
Very active, a lot of our revenues come from the Indian mid-market. We have got companies like Choughule mining, Greaves cotton, Bajaj electricals and JD chemicals. Infact,we have more than 70 clients and most of them have implemented Oracle.

When did you look at India as a serious market?
We have been in the mid-market ever since we started.

Do you offer SAP's mid-market offering?
No. We are not into B1. SAP is a very large product and it takes a fair amount of effort and commitment to implement it. We consider it only for our 1000+ customers. And the SMB segment in India, which comprises less than 200 crores, the functionality that something like Oracle provides i.e., integrated manufacturing, is the very key. I don't believe that B1 has the amount of functionality that Oracle has for the SMB market.

But you partner with both SAP and Oracle for larger projects?
It is a business necessity to maintain relations with them. These are the top two players in ERP and other enterprise applications, and they are going to continue to be there for a long time. We have to look at what fits our customer. Our model has been quite successful, and therefore we have been able to maintain a good relation with all of them. Most of our manufacturing customers are on Oracle, whereas SAP has a better presence in our BFSI and government customers.

Best-of-breed vs end-to-end, What are your customers demanding?
The trend among our customers is towards BoB with an eventual end goal of integrating with their other enterprise-wide applications, like ERP. That's why products like Cognos are successful in the market. They have very strong functionality and reporting capabilities. They are certainly way ahead from some of the end-to-end solution providers. That's why we are setting up alliances with Best-of-breed vendors too, because one product can't do it all.

Have you partnered with anybody other than Cognos for BI?
Yes. We have also partnered with Business Objects and Microstrategy. BI has become more or less part and parcel of most implementations we do. It's been a few months since we started these partnerships.

Most enterprises seem to be complaining about custom legacy application migration to SOA-enabled environments?
Being a business consultancy, what we do in these large scale projects is to look at the business requirements of the client. For any large scale implementation of the client, like changing the legacy system to a world-class tier-1 solution such as Oracle, the client is going to re-engineer their system. So the way they did business in the past is not necessarily the way they will do business in the future. We help our clients do a lot of package enable business redesign, and what that entails is that most of our clients change their business processes to adapt to our solutions. They adopt standard functionality, no customization, and no modification. Infact, when you go with the mindset of changing your business processes as opposed to extensively customizing the solution, that's where the true success of an IT implementation comes from, that is when the client is able to generate value. Just changing to a web-based GUI doesn't add value.

Any Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) plans?
In the Indian market, network connectivity is getting better, so SaaS will eventually become a viable option. But I believe, it is not a great option right now, if you really need 24x7 availability in a cost-effective manner. Most SaaS providers, like salesforce.com, have a very firm pricing model. It would definitely be an interesting market in the future. We are looking at how we can leverage SaaS for some of our customers.