Spotlight

Ramco: innovating every step of the way

Ramco Systems is changing its business model to meet the ever-changing demands of its customers. Priya Jain reports

Ramco Systems started its operations way back in 1989 as a division of Ramco Industries, a part of the 60-year-old Ramco Group. Ramco Systems was spun off as an independent company in April 1999 with a focus on the development of enterprise software solutions and services.

Meeting the demands

"These solutions are highly adaptable to the changing market dynamics, incorporating new practices to help an organisation grow" -S Parameshwar Executive Vice-President Ramco

Since its inception Ramco has had a product-centric structure, but with the changing requirements of its customers it has shifted to a solutions-centric structure.

S Parameshwar, Executive Vice-president of the company, explains that when Ramco started its operations, it developed and marketed off-the-shelf ERP (enterprise resource planning) products. For a given vertical, a typical ERP product has a set functionality that may not address all the unique requirements of an organisation. In a product-centric approach, such unique requirements can be addressed only through customisation—which is an expensive option.

Further, there are limitations in terms of the flexibility, scalability and adaptability of the product to changing business needs. “Through its years of experience, Ramco understood that customers require a blend of standard industry practices with company-specific unique processes to be able to address their competitive mission-critical requirements. Thus, Ramco visualised a solution-centric approach that would satisfy its customers’ requirements,” says Parameshwar.

The company aims at consolidating its presence in high potential segments such as manufacturing, transportation and e-governance. It has plans to establish technology and market-driven partnerships, and create an increased global presence for Ramco DecisionWorks in the corporate performance management space.

Working on limitations

Parameshwar is of the view that, “Today, IT implementation is unable to keep pace with changing business needs. It takes around 6 to 8 months to do an upgradation or implement changes in the IT infrastructure. Moreover, after the product is implemented, only 65 to 70 percent of its functions can be employed. Corporates therefore have to compromise with the limitations of the new systems even after a huge investment. On the other hand, if corporates upgrade their systems only by customisation, the required components will cost them less.”

To this end, Ramco has made significant investment in R&D and has developed Ramco VirtualWorks (RVW)—a model-based process for application, software assembly and delivery framework. “We have delivered assembled enterprise solutions to more than 50 organisations worldwide. Additionally, these solutions are highly adaptable to the changing market dynamics, incorporating new practices to help the organisation scale and grow,” explains Parameshwar. The solutions address a broad spectrum of industry requirements spanning manufacturing, logistics, retail, financial services, aviation and e-governance.

When Ramco introduced Ramco VirtualWorks in 2003, analysts had predicted that it would change the economics of application software. It is a component-based enterprise application framework for developing, deploying and maintaining medium-to-large-scale, multi-tier applications. The platform allows a business to first define business processes and then create applications on-the-fly using automated code development.

RVW builds business logic along with the requisite technology architecture. This can help to not only develop robust applications but also provide representation of business requirements so as to help the application respond to changes. Going a step ahead, the company now plans to focus on developing Adaptive Enterprise Solutions (AES) using the RVW platform.

Adaptive Enterprise Solutions

According to Parameshwar, (AES) provides the ability to build new solutions on the existing corporate infrastructure without much change in the legacy system.

He also believes that mergers and acquisitions are unpredictable circumstances that have an immediate impact on the IT set-up of the company. In such situations, AES help to quicken the process. Says Parameshwar, “The implementation of AES is 30 to 35 percent faster than a large-scale upgradation project.”

They already have a list of customers for AES such as Bharat Gears, AVT McCormick, Haldirams, Ahmedabad Electric Company, Centurion Bank, Government of Andhra Pradesh, ITC International Business Division, BHEL, Shree Cements and Ambuja Cements.

Marketing strategy

With the shift in the focus of the business came the change in Ramco’s business model. Earlier, Ramco had owned subsidiaries in geographies such as Germany, Britain, Singapore, Malaysia, the Middle East, South Africa, Switzerland and the United States. These subsidiaries were responsible for business development, localisation and implementation. Now that Ramco has become a solution-centric company, these geographies are only responsible for business development; thus, they are open to partnership strategies for sales and implementation.

They also have plans for the SMB segment. According to Parameshwar, they intend to consolidate their presence for Ramco e.Applications in the SMB market through channel partnerships in India.

e.Applications is the e-enabled version of what was originally called Ramco Marshall. It is a family of enterprise solutions covering over 15 industries, and covers four broad areas—ERP, EAM (enterprise asset management), Human Resource Management, and e-commerce solutions.

In addition, the offerings of a small division (which earlier hawked services in the area of networking projects) have been broadened to offer project services in e-business solutions, networking solutions, customer relationship management (CRM), process optimisation, open cast mining, client-server projects and professional services.

Under the Ramco umbrella you can also find converged networking solutions, information security services, total contact centre solutions and factory automation solutions. In addition, Ramco works towards re-engineering and consultation after capturing the concept of the entire business process of the organisation. Their partners are generally resellers who implement their products after consultation. In the converged networking arena they are users of Nortel solutions in India.

Further, Ramco provides security consulting to many companies, right from framing the policy to vulnerability testing to third-party auditing and BS779 certification. They re-sell solutions from CheckPoint and WebSense; in the domain of contact centre solutions, they provide a total systems integration solution including Automatic Call Diallers and eTalk.

Customer response

“When we came up with our products the initial reaction was disbelief. Slowly, as we got a positive response from customers after they saw proof of our concepts, we observed an increase in references. Since then, the response to the ERP suite has been quite positive with large customers across various segments,” says Parameshwar.

Some of their representative customers include Moser Baer and Uniqema & Fosroc from the manufacturing segment, and Reliance Energy, which implemented EAM. In the Human Resources Management Solutions (HRMS) segment they serve Intel and Seagate, and in the aviation industry, Indian. Their other customers include Tata Teleservices, Hutch, Dishnet, BSE, NSE, South Indian Bank, Indian Bank, Saraswat Bank and Kotak.

For Ramco, of the various segments, those showing great promise include e-governance, aviation, BFSI and manufacturing.

According to Parameshwar, their USP has been to offer products that deliver solutions that handle technology obsolescence and change on demand.

priya@expresscomputeronline.com