Ramco Systems, the home-grown business software maker which is part of Chennai-based diversified business conglomerate Ramco Group, on Friday announced its partnership with Amazon. This will help it to offer its ‘enterprise resource planning (ERP) on cloud’ using Amazon web services platform. In an interview with Bibhu Ranjan Mishra, Ramco Systems’ CEO Virender Aggarwal tells what it means for the company and the future of cloud ERP. Edited excerpts
Why did you decide to offer your cloud ERP using Amazon web platform only?
Since we are now targetting global audience, they will feel more comfortable if they have our software in their country. That’s the reason why we chose Amazon who has presence almost everywhere in the world. The advantage with Amazon is that you can increase or decrease capacity based on the demand. Besides, this partnership also enables us to be present in Amazon’s marketplace and network with all their customers.
How is the demand of cloud ERP in Indian market?
We first started offering cloud ERP about four years ago, and while selling to Indian customers, we learnt a lot and improved the product further. We have seen a good success rate despite the fact that cloud ERP as a concept is still evolving in India. Now, we have around 350-400 customers in India who are using cloud ERP. We are also going in for a partnership model which we were not doing earlier.
But, the share of cloud ERP in your overall revenues is quite less now?
Our incremental revenues from cloud ERP are around 15-20 per cent of the total revenues. But the fact is that most of the new businesses that are coming in are for cloud ERP. Going by this, we may see that in the next two years, the share of cloud ERP of our total revenues to go up to as high as 75 per cent.
What is happening in ERP market as not many large ERP implementations seem to be happening?
Nobody is committing for large ERP implementation because everybody is waiting for the cloud. Besides, nobody wants to pay the kind of licencing fee they used to pay. I think the days of large ERP implementations are over. People are instead preferring to implement something which is more manageable.
What is the future of on-premise ERP then?
I will be very surprised if somebody talks about on-premise ERP in 2014. May be, they will continue doing so for one more year; that is the maximum I could see. We are seeing a trend where clients who have already implemented on-premise ERP are moving to the cloud.
You already derive about 65% of your revenues from abroad, mostly for your traditional (on-premise) ERP offering. What is the plan for your cloud ERP?
We have already opened offices in the UK, Australia and Switzerland. We have tied-up with partners in many other countries including Holland, Dubai, Singapore and Brunei where we were not present.
What is the way forward for Ramco Systems?
We want our software to be very simple to use and user friendly. We have introduced a design philosophy called ‘mobile first’. So, whatever software we are developing now, we are first designing for smartphones and tablets, and then taking it to normal screens.