NASSCOM EMERGE Community An initiative to collaborate with members of NASSCOM

MSME IT cos are based on certain great idea and passionate way of offering that solution. Core purpose is to deliver interest and attraction to prospects, acquire few lighthouse clients and grow and consolidate. NO ONE SHOULD OVERLOOK KEY OBJECTIVE OF SETTING UP THE CO. THAT COMES FIRST AND FOREMOST.

IT system, emailing system, central servers, network system, broadband connectivity, telephone system requires a 24 x 7 attention for uptime. Obviously either techies must wear multiple caps to deal with them personally with or without vendor support or do outsourcing to 3rd party.

However much issues and problems with IT infrastructure interests you- the core promoters and thought leaders at the helm of the co, never get diverted into side activities like IT infrastructure. Temptation and trying to show that you can do it yourself must be restricted and NEVER AT THE COST OF THE CORE BUSINESS.

Then decision are simple and obvious choice is the best approach.

Am trying to locate some data to understand the reasons for lower acceptance of CRM, CLPs and other available systems by Indian SMEs. Is it just Cost ? I am not too certain

There is a crying need in India for a Hosted Server, Email, Website hosting services company that can rent out Partial Linux boxes or Windows servers. Even software for managing these remotely is available on OpenSource.

For example, our own company, Ajira has been using www.hardhathosting.com , a small company in Kansas City, Missouri for the past 6 years without any hassles. We pay them a monthly $36 a month plus an optional $36 a month for SPAM filtering for the entire company's website, email, FTP services, etc. We can even login remotely to our server box and install open source software like Bugzilla and SugarCRM software and create our own Bug Tracking and online CRM web sites with sub domains like bugs.ajira.com !

This way many small and medium sized companies can atleast get rid of their website hosting and email services worries. Having one of your software engineers double up as a system admin can take care of PC installs and updates locally in the offices. That needs to be done locally of course!

We talk about Cloud Computing and SaaS! Here's a great idea that will work very well in the Indian context particularly for the SME companies.  

Great example and a role  model for we people in India....

But that calls for mindset and courage and not endless evaluation, my friends said so....,

Idea is to FOCUS ON CO CORE BUSINESS and not tire ourselves out on such subjects for sake of FULL ATTN ON KEY CO BUSINESS....

Kumar Rajeev,

It will be better if you mention your own ideas on the subject before you pose the query. This discussion thread will benefit from your ideas, views and understanding as it is not a Q&A thread

I had started this discussion to understand the fixed expenses of SMEs on managing IT infrastructure like servers & storage in India. 

An automotive ancilliary company whom I advice spends about Rs 80L on licence fees and support staff per annum - capex is not included in this.  On a turnover of Rs400crore that is a large value.

In the US the general expense of an SME on IT per person is about 13-14K USD.  Out of this the Operational expense is say about 70% of this value. 

If these are the kind of values that Indian SMEs face - and I looked at software comapnies first because they should be the most tech savy - as fixed cost, then in these times there is trouble. 

I was looking only at the financial part, but you'll have brought out some other really interesting aspects to the whole discussion.

Animesh

SMEs should also look at Google Apps for free services - for example we use Google Email for free for our nuvedalearning.com emails. 

These are simple ways to cut costs and reduces overhead in the early stages of the business. 

Krishnan

Animesh, let me add our experience to Krishnan's comment - we use Google Apps and Google Email and have been very happy with it. I'm not sure what the numbers will work out to be for a larger group (since GApps is a paid service over 50 users), but I'd very surprised if it works out even close to the cost of having your own servers and email+spam control infrastructure.

Here are some of the things we use:

• Google Email (Free) for all our email, in our domain(s)
  
• Google Apps (Free) for some word-processing and spread-sheets, but we continue to use M$FT Office (for proposals) and Open Office (for internal documents) also
  
• M$FT Shared View (Free) for web demos (we moved from a paid subscription to GoToMeeting and are very happy, not only because this is free!)
• SabseBolo (Free) for phone conferencing, both internally and with customers and prospects
• Benchmark Email (Paid) for outbound email marketing (we don't do large-scale email in our CRM, for good reason!).

We DO have Sys Admin skills in-house, but that's ONLY to support our SaaS offering, NOT for our internal infrastructure. IMHO, SMEs have no need to build their own infrastructure, when there are so many alternatives available (yes, even in India).

@Kumar Rajeev: your question is like the line "When did you stop beating your wife?" I don't know if it is at all valid to say SMEs are slow in accepting things like CRM (BTW what's CLP? Sorry I'm showing my ignorance!). Our own experience has been to the contrary and I have heard similar stories from other companies in this space. I think it is about reaching out to the target market with the right message, not about any market being unwilling to consider progressive steps. Would love to hear contention!

Yes, we even sw vendors ( MSME) and spending all our time to promote new ideas and solution to our prospects are afraid of trying new things, even free. Mindset is the issue.

Yes!! Mindset is the issue. But, as much as we talk about the mindset as an issue, I believe the responsibility also lies with the solution provider to convince the customer that it is of value and there is no over-killing - especially when it comes to SME.

It is not always "free" that will work, rather it is relevance. However new the idea is, if it is not relevant and able to offer value to the existing business, I dont think we will be able to sell the idea.

As Kumar Raja was mentioning, the reluctance in fast embracing the hosted model is because of the fact that there is always a nagging feeling that "data is not in my premises" - irrespective of the security that the hosting provider offers, unless that feeling is taken care, I dont think SMEs will come forward to embrace hosted model that easily.

Prasad:

EVERTHING IS IN THE MIND. Mindset could shrink or expand the size of the market.

1. No matter how much the vendor or consultant explains about the value of the solution, the customers need to trust, feel the pain, perceive the value and purchase.

2. Do you believe that email has so much of confidential information from RFP to customer complaints? Many SMEs use the hosted model for email.

Yes LP.

What I am trying to put forward is - unless there is constant effort from the solutions providers to educate the customers, the scenario might not change and the onus should be taken by the solution providers rather than leaving it to the market maturity.

Yes - things like e-mail can definitely be on an hosted model but, when it comes to ERP on SaaS etc where one will have the core business data, then the question of uncertainty over data might play

Prasad: Nothing can be more confidential than leads that are not yet closed. Most companies put that in salesforce.com.

Yes, agree there is security concern. Obviously, it will take some time to establish that trust between the client and the SaaS provider. Companies should not put everything in one place and give everthing to one company.

If SMBs have the budget and capability to "EFFECTIVELY/EFFICIENTLY" manage on their own within their own office, they can continue to follow that model. Some of the SMBs already on salesforce.com. Many do not have a ERP, CRM or KM type of application. They miss so much and relatively become weaker day by day.

Dear Mr Reddy

Mindset issues means own mind-set, which is beyond influence of others like sales and marketing people of vendor cos, lack of knowledge update, lack of self aspiration etc.

Fear of unknown is quite common across buyers and users. Lack of motivation on part of IT SMEs, who try to sell sw solutions to others, but themselves are scared of same technological stuff can not be addressed by anyone. When maturity enhances by worldly wisdom, IT SMEs will change and chase features and ideas of interest.

Many IT cos are so engrossed in themselves, debating why Infy/Wipro/ Microsoft do what it does and does not, who got what orders for what exact reasons, hold endless review meetings internally, review internal IT hw and sw, seating arrangments etc. Meetings and mails are considered as daily contribution. Of course they do so as they can afford to do that, rather than be busy on the street fighting battles with competition and getting higher value contracts and adding to the reference list.  

Such cos wait to become 1000th client and not first 10 even if it saves costs and efforts. They will remian there as they deserve to be there.

IT Business is that of ideas and better ideas. Your idea Vs my idea. At least one idea must be good. Status quo is dangerous for emerging IT cos. Why should IT solution vendor teach what is good, if the buyer IT cos wants to be in dormant state.

Eventually it is mindset only and not anything else. IT technology and services is not meant for fearful people, living by status quo, enjoying others sufferings and waiting indefinitely for technology to mature. There is nothing like mature technology in the world. It is all comparative.

Early birds and IT cos with guts will propser with great street wins and offerings, while others wait and stagnate. Saas and hosting subject is moving too fast towards extra ordinary simplicity and benefits. It is meant only for those who wish to be updated with trends.

Avinash/Nasscom

It could be a good idea if Nasscom organizes a survey amongst EMERGE 50 shortlisted cos to know how many use what back office model for emailing, co website, intranet, and apps deevelopment and test environment servers etc ..Maybe such learning should be highlighted on forthcoming Nasscom event at Delhi so that takeways are enriched with inspirations....

This thread will be best served by such statistics....and stories of experience..( like what we find from Nari kannan and Narasimhan- Kishore as shared above) ...

Excellenet learning from this thread.... 

I think Raja has come out with a very good idea.  My concept on starting the discussion was something else but this discussion has had some very interesting points being brought out.   I am sure the inputs in this discussion can help all the members find more value based options while conducting their business.  So like Raja says if we can actually incorporate the findings into a survey then it can help every one.

I just started following this thread and it's an interesting issue which we've been battling with as well.

Initially, we started with shared hosted servers (Interland) and then moved on to dedicated Rackspace servers. While these do cost us a couple of thousand dollars per month now, but the up-time, reliability and customer support is well worth it. So, for all customer facing systems like website, store management, order management, CRM, forums, we use the Rackspace server.

For internal development, we have a local server that is connected 24/7 with two broadband connections (primary a 4MBPs shared broadband, with a backup secondary 1MBps from another provider). This server runs Windows Server 2003, and has Kaspersky Antivirus. We also have ZyXel UTM box that acts as router/firewall and also offers content filtering. So, internally we host our SCM (we use SVN) and project management tools here (we use AceProject). This is exposed via a live URL that allows us external access (but in a DMZ zone). Maintaining this internal setup needs a dedicated IT person, but it allows us utmost flexibility in configuration and privacy issues (as our entire code is then hosted internally). Since we're an ISV, so our developers can easily manage this setup, with some vendor help. Bio-metric systems futher protect such access in our office.

However, if you lesser code/data and lesser privacy issues, you can use third party SCMs like CVSDude or Hosted-Projects (we've used them earlier), Basecamp or Deskway for project management, Google for emails/apps, a Wiki service and an online hosted bug repository (we've used Mantis and it works just fine, looks apart). Many CRM offerings have also started hosted services; thereby, not needing you to install any infrastructure for the same with near 99.8% availability. If you do not want to use Google for emails, many companies also offer email boxes for like $1 a month per user. So, for 20-25 users max, including all apps, you might be looking at 2-3K$ per year including all these services.

What we've found difficult to manage is internal access restrictions - like what set of developers get access to what sites, protocols etc. Since new recruits are most targeted at this, setting up such restrictions (keeping in mind that you can always use proxy or other methods to get around it) is tough. But, again with the right training and approach - manageable, though a little time consuming.

If you need any more information about out setup, I would be glad to help.

One pitfall of moving lots of things online is managing the social side of security.

There was a recent episode at twitter where some person guessed one employee's google password, and from there managed to access not only all the mails of the person, but also confidential documents and spreadsheets stored on google apps.

Even if the application as such is completely secure, it just takes one person with a weak password or one weak link to get access to a lot of stuff. Whereas before you had to first get into the local network before you could access these internal apps.