SMEs Lap up IT solutions

The small-to-medium-businesses pie is beginning to look more and more delicious as biggies like IBM, Hitachi and Dell enter the fray. With SME being the latest buzzword among big IT companies, there are technologies galore available for the owners of small organisations to solve their business problems.

“The Indian marketplace boasts of more than 35 million small and medium businesses and is now competing globally,” says Ramesh Narasimhan, Director, General , IBM India/South Asia. “They will need to gain a competitive edge to win amidst global competition and technology provides them this edge.”

Ever since the economic downturn started, the IT sector has been in near-dire straits, with lay-offs and cost-cutting in several companies. Also, with overseas projects drying up, several employees find themselves on the bench.

Prashanth GJ, Regional Sales Director-South, Hitachi Data Systems India, adds, “In this market condition where global companies and large enterprises have been hit due to their global exposure, we are seeing that most of the SME business segments are not affected to that extent.”

While small businesses are being bombarded with several technologies, there have been reports of them being reluctant to invest in them in an attempt to ‘play safe’ in these trying times. Agrees Narasimhan, “While this is partly true, we are seeing a lot of SME customers accepting the fact that technology is becoming a key business enabler as well as a differentiator for them in the market place.”

He further adds, “Cloud computing, virtualisation or SaaS are jargon. These tend to be overused by technology vendors and therefore scare away SMEs.” The solution, he says, is to break these terms down into easily understandable business value propositions to the stakeholders within the organisation.

Vendors hit pay-dirt with SMEs

Here are a couple of examples of businesses that have utilised solutions provided by IT vendors and benefitted tremendously.

The first one is Kusumgar Corporates. A mid-sized company with 200 employees, it manufactures a variety of military, industrial, geosynthetics and recreational fabrics.

Kusumgar maintains a lean IT staff and sought an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution that it could easily manage and maintain. The company selected IBM Smart running Infinite’s Textile Integrated Manufacturing (TIM) ERP application. “Kusumgar chose to run TIM on Smart because it would be simple to procure, install and maintain,” says Siddharth Kusumgar, President, Kusumgar Corporates. “Now we have a complete, low-cost, integrated infrastructure that we expect to provide us a low total cost of ownership while supporting all of our business needs,” he explains.

The other is Maharashtra Knowledge Corporation Ltd (MKCL) for their IT infrastructure development programme, who utilised NComputing’s virtualisation software solution, allowing sharing of hardware and software resources that would have otherwise been wasted.

Danny Nagdev, Sr. System Administrator and Programme Coordinator, says, “We have recommended Ncomputing Products to our 3600+ learning centers in Maharashtra. The solution has significantly helped in decreasing the onetime cost/investment as well as the power consumption for each learning centre.”