Wouldn’t it be nice if chief executive officers of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) could bring their employees closer to their prospects, customers and other companies that matter to their business, making everyone more efficient and enabling them to see for themselves improvements such as rising efficiency and return on investment?
Wapr, a business-to-business (B2B) collaboration platform created by Core Software, a Hyderabad-based web development outsourcing company, enables just that. Wapr gives SMEs a platform that helps keep everyone up-to-date in real-time.
Marketing teams can reach their most specific target prospects. Salespersons can follow and receive real-time feeds about their potential prospects and engage them to follow-up more meaningfully, rather than using emails and calls to find out “if they are ready to buy”.
“SMEs face a lot of challenges in adopting IT. This prompted us to develop the Wapr B2B online community that helps SMEs connect to each other and start exchanging business,” explained Kiran Teegala, CEO and president of Core Software.
Wapr, developed on the Java platform, provides a secured Intranet to an SME, which will help invite all its employees share and exchange files and collaborate with them. This apart, the platform gives access to around 15 business applications, including marketing, sales, inventory and recruitment management, to run its business.
While Wapr’s 15 applications and B2B services are free for those SMEs that have less than 10 employees, it charges others anywhere between Rs 5,000 and Rs 12,000 per month, depending on their employee strength and usage patterns.
“Wapr gives an SME access to its peers’ company profiles, and enables it to create its own profile (like ‘About Us’) and make it publicly available on the B2B platform. This would help the company identify its prospects and do business with other SMEs. There are about 350 million SMEs across the world and getting all of them onto this platform is a Herculean task. Hence, we have white-labelled Wapr and are approaching large enterprises who already have SMEs as their customers,” Teegala said.
Core Software has recently signed a revenue-sharing agreement with Tata Teleservices. Now, Tata Tele’s recently-soft launched TataB2B.com, an initiative to nurture its 60,000 SME clients, is powered by Wapr, offering its white-labelled services like the B2B community, secured Intranet and app stores to those SMEs.
The company is in an advanced stage of signing a similar agreement with ICICI Bank, which has over 1.2 million SME clients, for its India.smetoolkit.org project. This project has been set up by ICICI Bank and the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the World Bank arm that lends to the private sector.
The website has been created as an online resource centre that provides advice and business tips, empowering small businesses in India to become globally-competitive. It offers free downloadable tools that help create business plans and build websites; a large collection of articles on topics like financial accounting, marketing, technology and international business; and free enablers like business directory listing and legal updates.
Teegala said Wapr is expecting to garner revenues of Rs 114 crore from the platform in the next 36 months.
