Cloud ERP Solutions For Small And Medium Sized Businesses In India

Start-ups usually look for innovative ways to minimise their investments while adopting the latest technology systems to accelerate their growth. As a result, they end up adopting multiple types of IT solutions to manage various aspects of their business – CRM to manage sales activities, financial apps for accounting, and other tools for warehouse management, e-commerce, databases, the list goes on. This becomes a Business Hairball – one business entangled with multiple inter-twined systems. This is what most Indian organisational leaders have inherited as their legacy systems.

According to research firm Zinnov, while small and medium businesses in India are witnessing steady growth, they are also facing many challenges that need to be overcome in order to sustain growth. The major business roadblocks include lack of technology know-how, unclear return on investments, high cost for technical support and high investments made in legacy systems.

Having complex legacy systems means organisations spend valuable resources on integration, costly developments etc all in an effort to make systems talk to each other and for what…just to get some kind of coherent data (not information). The Business Hairball contributes towards huge ongoing IT Infrastructure costs, inefficiency in business practices due to double entry and most importantly soiled business practices or rather departmental practices. Managing such complexities can be daunting for any start-up that is already struggling with innumerable other challenges related to funding, manpower and other resource constraints.

Managing Start-Up Challenges

Cloud is gradually becoming a preferred infrastructure mode for start-ups, helping them grow and scale rapidly. Cloud based ERP solutions have made the Business Hairball a thing of the past. Indian start-ups have also understood the fact that cloud offers services that can enable them to compete and win over competitors.

Cloud ERP is a pristine method advocated for deploying ERP using cloud architecture. It provides a good alternative to costly age-old on-premise systems. Cloud ERP solutions are opening up new avenues for start-ups in India to do business with their clients, interact with their employees, stakeholders and suppliers. A cloud based ERP solution can be customised according to the requirements of the organisation without affecting the agility of its workforce.

The initial cost of cloud-based ERP is typically lower because of the fact that the organisations simply implement the required software and access the data through their internet connection. The cloud ERP provider hosts and maintains the entire IT infrastructure, ensures the data is secure with the system is always running and the product enhancements are rolled out painlessly to your solution without breaking previously implemented customizations. It may be stated that cloud-based ERP solutions can act in a proactive way to make your business grow by leaps and bounds.

Driving Transformation with Cloud

A recent survey conducted by Frost & Sullivan shows that cloud adoption by SMBs in India as growing at a CAGR of 25 percent. According to a study conducted by Forrester, about 89 percent Indian enterprises believe that the cloud computing model is relevant to their organisation and nearly 79 percent respondents in India say they currently have either already taken cloud-based initiatives, or are planning to implement cloud or 'as-a-service' approach, in the next 12 months. This clearly points towards the growing realisation and acceptance of a cloud-based model for growth.

Cloud-based ERP solutions developed by Indian ISVs are playing a significant role in driving business transformation at much lower TCO with innovative pricing models to manage IT. Cloud-based models are compelling businesses to switch from home-grown legacy applications to more standardised apps and business processes.

Indian start-ups that have already made the switch to the cloud are beginning to seeing benefits. Forget costs, they are able to concentrate on doing what they do best, their business! What's more, IT is taking its rightful place as a very useful tool that just enables one's business and doesn't need maintenance or management. It just works!

Date: 
Tuesday, July 1, 2014

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