TechNayak

I see a trend, or fad even of small and medium sector industries increasing adoption of software to do their business. Be it a real estate or a flower merchant, you see small ERP’s , CRM’s , billing softwares , websites and other technology aiding these small businesses. Given the recent boom in economy, at least in India, there are a lot of startups springing up with their market changing concepts, pitches and even technologies. Every company has to incline itself to a set of processes to survive the long race, and aligning to processes instantly adds about 10 or 20 software dependencies for project management, documentation, knowledge gathering, HR and others.

Thats where the biggies are trying to cash in whilst some startups are trying to consolidate. MS has their Axapta and BI suite and Google have their Office suite. MS sells their ERP Axapta and BI to SME’s at unbelievably low prices compared to the other tools around , infact, the products themselves have been designed for this target audience. Google offers their apps for a very low cost, where as MS gives their entire BI suite with database, ETL and Charting for the price of a little known database. MS also has a range of small business softwares which they sell to SME who don’t want to left behind in terms of technology like their small business servers and other software.

In India, there is a huge boom predicted in the retail sector. ERPs, CRMs, Warehouse management systems, portals , Business Intelligence reporting and other similar developmental work will see a upsurge in the next couple of years. People just starting up, an essential piece of advice, DO NOT THINK OF YOUR EXIT STRATEGY. Doing so will only deteriorate the quality of your product, and Im saying this because I see a lot of individuals talking about a concept , which isnt even built yet and they talk about their exits. Exits are for extremely successful or totally unsuccessul products, more so the latter. If you survive in the industry in a competitive place like India, its likely that you will be moderately successful and that you will have your worth adversaries. In such a situation you will have to strive to keep your product feature rich and niche and not many may want to buy your product if your competitor decides to sell it for a quarter of a million less. To talk about your exit strategy even before building your product isn’t really a good idea and flaunting it around definitely isn’t.
The SME space is buzzing and it will be worthy seeing a domination in that segment. Right now its open for play, so start pitching in those great ideas. If you are looking for a place to present your ideas, I suggest Proto.in happening in the first week of June, rush in your entries.