IoT and 3D Printing will bring the next wave of digital disruption

Epicor Software Corporation, a global provider of business software solutions for manufacturing, distribution, retail and services organisations have recently announced the launch of its new India Technology Centre in Bengaluru. Mark Mincin, senior vice president and chief Information officer, Epicor in an exclusive conversation with Ankush Kumar – shares the company’s expansion plans with the newly opened technology centre and how various disruptive technologies are impacting the overall ERP business in India.

What were the primary reasons that Epicor decided to venture into India? What are the areas you are looking to explore?

There were two predominant reasons. One was to access the contemporary talent or skills that are in very high demand in the other markets we operate in. Especially in the areas of social, mobile, big data, analytics, natural language processing, what I would call contemporary technologies. Secondly, Epicor has been doing business in India since 2011. With the “Make in India” initiative and our expertise in the ERP products, we saw the opportunity to establish our presence to not only service our customers from India but to also create a better customer experience by expanding our reach in the country.

Tell us about the newly opened Epicor center in India?

The 48,000 square-foot Center is located in the newly established RMZ EcoWorld Technology Park and houses 50 staff. We will be doubling that number by the end of the calendar year and we are targeting to be about 375-400 people at the end of 2016. The India Technology Center is a key component of the company’s globalization strategy and it has been created to support product development, support and services, in order to drive performance and growth on a global scale. Epicor is currently recruiting for further positions in product engineering, quality assurance, consulting, customer support and IT and will double its staff strength by the end of this year. The new Technology Center will help Epicor continue to deliver product innovation so that customers can quickly take advantage of new technologies in order to become more competitive. This builds on our vision to eliminate complexity and make ERP easier to use, more collaborative and more responsive, across multiple devices and deployment choices – on premise or in the Cloud. Additionally, it will strengthen the company’s support to customers and partners, both globally and locally.

How has the ERP technology been disrupted due to the emergence of SMAC?

We have social and mobile capabilities, but I think our sweet spot in enterprise resource planning (ERP) is that there is a convergence of the SMAC (social, mobile, analytics, and cloud) technologies and even Internet of Things(IoT). Our market focus is small to medium size distribution and manufacturing companies. And if you talk about disruption, I would add things like 3D printing and the way it is transforming the manufacturing sector. And I think it is the next wave of disruption in manufacturing which isn’t highly custom but tailored products can be made cost effectively on a large scale. Even the role of IoT in instrumentation and listening systems as part of the supply chain will be revolutionary. We see fairly dramatic changes in the coming 2-5 years, as the SMAC technologies become more prevalent and integrated but even more broadly other technologies that will augment SMAC. Particularly IoT and 3D printing will be disruptive as part of the evolution of the digital technologies.

What are the key business verticals that you are focusing at the moment?

Epicor has 20,000 customers globally but if you look at our customer base from a vertical perspective it’s very much manufacturing and distribution companies and that trend in India is certainly not unique. It is pretty much a global trend for us. And then we have a retail offering as well , more so in North America than outside of North America and we have a very niche market in hard goods retailers, lumber yards, hardware stores in that space. To answer the question I would say distribution, manufacturing and hard goods retail are probably the three core verticals for us.

Generally the biggest problem for the CIO’s is that they have the responsibility of investing in new technologies and they also need to ensure that the processes and systems are also secured. So with more adoption of new and emerging technologies there is always a risk of modern day security issues. What is your take on this?

I completely agree with this. I was commenting to someone earlier about this transition and they said that the obstacles for customers, especially from small to medium sized companies, moving to the cloud is putting the trust that that company will secure their data. Or in the case of ERP companies the customer’s data will remain secure and the business capability has the appropriate level of resiliency, business continuity and disaster recovery. We have examples of companies whether ERP or otherwise that ended up on the front page of newspapers because they haven’t secured those systems. So I do think it is a very important focus for us. I have been with Epicor a little over a year now and one of the first things I did was to give a proposal to my CEO to increase our internal as well as externally supported information security capabilities. I hired the head of information security of United Airlines globally. I completely agree that from a risk perspective security is a key area and therefore we have selected SaaS technology. At Epicor we look closely at companies, if they have the right processes and certifications and safeguards to protect our data and employees’ data appropriately.

What are the challenges that you foresee in the Indian market?

The biggest one that I have seen is the trend of SaaS, certainly from the ERP perspective. I think India is not a SaaS first market yet. However, the trends are increasing where if you look at growth of SaaS based ERP from a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) perspective its growing faster, but if you look at the numbers it’s little behind as compared to other markets, which are relatively embracing the cloud. Maybe some of it is regulatory and policy driven but I think the benefits of cloud and the comfort with security, resiliency and availability is starting to bring a change in the adoption. I think we will be able to leverage the capabilities SaaS to the cloud that may haven’t been the case in the past.