Ramco Systems, the Chennai-based cloud-provider and arguably the largest Indian stand-alone cloud brand, has expanded its portfolio to analytics.
The player, one of the pioneers of the Cloud model in India and among the most affordable among such services, said it has around 3,000 users for its current offering — enterprise resource planning or ERP. ERP software is used to keep a tab of a company’s assets, operations and processes and is considered the heart of a company’s software infrastructure.
Ramco had bet on the Cloud several years ago, coming out with its offering when most people did not know what Cloud computing was or before it became the catchy buzzword it has become now. It is also one of the few Indian firms that has tried to crack the product market in Software, especially in an emerging, high-technology sector like the Cloud. India is famous for being an ‘IT superpower’ without a healthy start-up or product-oriented ecosystem.
Ramco primarily serves the needs of the price-conscious small and medium businesses in the country, a market finds prices charged by international ERP brands such as Oracle and SAP unaffordable.
The firm said it is targeting to add another 4,000 users this year and has even designed a new service called ‘Gateway’ that will allow companies to check out its offerings without making big investments and move gradually to the cloud if they wish to.
The Analytics service — which helps companies deal with data such as customer acquisition and sales numbers, helps them extract insights about the performance of their firm and fine tune their strategy. The analytics module extracts the data from the company’s ERP software. If the firm is using a non-Ramco, industry standard non-Cloud ERP such as SAP, the analytics solution will interact with it using built-in connector software, Ramco said.
Cloud is supposed to be the next big revolution in computing — similar to the jump from ‘downloaded’ mail of the old Outlook era to the modern Hotmail, Yahoo Mail etc.. India is considered a core market for the Cloud as it helps reduce the cost of using an ERP or similar software by as much as 99%.
Some believe that Cloud-based software may become totally free and ad-supported.
