Anish Kanaran, Channel Director for Epicor in the Middle East, Africa and India, answers questions about the differentiators for his company’s ERP, the cloud model and the implementation challenges faced by enterprises in an e-mail interview to Sanjay Gupta. Excerpts
Epicor is a relatively less known name in the Indian enterprise tech space. How are you positioned vis-à-vis other ERP vendors and what are your top differentiators?
Epicor ERP was officially launched in India in May 2011 and we have made excellent progress during the last two years. We have a range of customers, primarily manufacturers, who are using Epicor ERP in India.
While the larger tier 1 vendors have a head-start on us vis-à-vis their visibility in the domestic market, Epicor ERP repeatedly gets a thumbs-up from customers when they compare our product to the competition. So, when we are able to display the functionality and features of the Epicor solution, customers see that it is a product they can rely on well into the future.
Some of our specific differentials include an agile business architecture based on 100% SOA (service-oriented architecture) to help companies quickly adjust to changing business conditions, a modern interface that fits into today’s workplace, global functionality to conduct business worldwide and still meet local regulations, and about a third of the cost of ownership compared to larger ERP systems.
One of the other points of differentiation is our aspiration to add a social voice to ERP by integrating status updates, news feeds and broader SharePoint communities to provide an even more powerful tool to achieve best-in-class business performance. These technologies will further empower knowledge workers by leveraging contextual information about them—the environment, processes, communities and various personas employed when interacting with computing technology—to improve the quality of those interactions.
Which vertical segments are you particularly looking at in India?
Manufacturing is the biggest industry segment for Epicor in India. With its extended manufacturing functionality, industry-specific features and a modern and flexible platform, Epicor ERP is the ideal choice for manufacturers in India who want to continue to grow their business, both nationally and internationally.
Could you please share details of your on-premise and cloud-based licenses and how is each segment growing? Does that reflect the general trend in the industry?
In a report published by Gartner last year, spending on cloud services is expected to grow 17.7% through 2016 worldwide. Even though there are some variations between cloud services segments, overall the outlook is very positive. Additionally, a rapid growth is also predicted for SaaS based services such as cloud-based office suites and ERP solutions, supported by a strong growth in cloud application infrastructure services, or PaaS (platform as a service).
However, we currently don’t see as strong a demand for full fledged SaaS ERP solutions here in India as we see in other countries, such as the USA.
What, according to you, are the key challenges faced by Indian enterprises that have already installed some ERP solution?
Too often companies are not completely satisfied with their ERP implementation or the system that they have chosen. This is very distressing, considering the positive change that can be initiated with a proven ERP system that is skilfully implemented.
Some of the most common problem areas that can sink an ERP implementation even before it takes off pertain to: understanding of the customer’s pain areas that will allow an ERP provider to tailor the implementation to suit the unique requirements; ability of the ERP system to scale with the needs and budgets; enough resources available with the ERP provider for implementation; understanding about the full depth of the product offering; commitment of top management; clarity of project objectives and milestones; and user training.
At one point, ERP implementations were bogged down by too much customization and project delays. How has the situation changed, if at all?
Epicor provides tools that allow the customer to make business process changes without actually touching the code of the product. This eliminates two problems: one, the product is able to suit customer needs, they can have the product behave the way they want it to; and two, if a new version comes out, they are able to upgrade to it without requiring migration. It is Epicor’s 100% SOA business architecture that provides this flexibility.
