"Businesses want Agility, Accessibility & Scalability from Technology"

Indian enterprise IT consumption is evolving thick and fast with IT investments and strategic decisions being aligned to gain competitive advantage in today’s dynamic and demanding business environment. Cost efficiency, operational excellence and compliance adherence are becoming the key drivers of all IT investments. Organizations, be it small or big are looking for reliable and cost-effective technology platforms that can help them build flexible and scalable IT infrastructure. Expectedly, the market for Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Business Process Management (BPM) and Mobility driven IT applications is experiencing exponential surge in demand in India.

Mr Jeet stated, “The nexus of forces such as Social, Mobile, Cloud and Analytics have also greatly impacted IT infrastructure decisions. They have proved to be game changers with regards to driving accessibility, flexibility, scalability and agility, reach and impact.”

In an exclusive interaction with Faiz Askari of SMEStreet, Virender Jeet, Sr. VP – Technology at Newgen Software highlighted overall perspective of trends and market insights.

The excerpts:

What are the key opportunities do you witness for Newgen in next one year or so?

Newgen is firmly placed to consolidate its leadership position in the near future with its innovative and business ready applications built on robust platforms supporting rapid growth and scalability. Digital India theme is fast catching up with our Prime Minister keen on exploring newer ways of digitally transforming business landscape in India. Advent of new age technologies and SMAC forces (Social, Mobile, Analytics, and Cloud) are further fuelling this emerging trend. All this augurs well for us with our integrated suite of products in the ECM, BPM and CCM space together driving end-to-end digitization for organizations across industries.

Recently, there has been a lot of demand for enterprise ECM-BPM software in BFSI, Real Estate and Defense sectors. The CIOs and CXOs are highly optimistic about automating and streamlining organizational processes through advanced ECM & BPM technology platforms. Enterprises today have greater exposure to innovative and disruptive technologies which are altering their business decisions as they realize the importance of sophisticated IT solutions. The demand for reliable and cost-effective technology platforms which can provide organizations with flexible and scalable capabilities will be on the rise. Also, in an effort to create operational efficiency and process standardization, end-to-end solutions will be selected over silos of business applications which run independently.

We have tried to leverage the new age technologies to enhance our product suite further and offer greater business value to our clients. Our solutions have built-in social collaboration capabilities that allow businesses to manage the information arising out of the social space. Our Enterprise Mobility Platform extends the functionality of our ECM & BPM suites on mobile, rendering a great degree of convenience and efficiency to the business users. Newgen’s cloud solution provides a new, cost-effective alternative to traditional enterprise systems by providing organizations complete access to its proven ECM and BPM solutions, on a pay per use basis, while securing privacy and security of intellectual property.

As the leading IT software products company in India, Newgen is in a very strong position to cater to the dynamic business needs with its advanced and future ready suite of products.

How do you look at Indian small and mid-sized businesses segment? Please share your thoughts and plans for tapping this market?

Small and Mid-sized business segment has lot of growth potential in India, especially considering the fact that the new government is giving special emphasis on developing this segment in India. With approximately 30 million SMEs in India spread across all industry verticals, SMEs offer immense business opportunities for us.

We have introduced user-friendly and quick-to-deploy, shrink-wrapped versions of our products which will help Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) achieve operational excellence, reduce business cycle time, and enhance productivity. We have leveraged global best practices and our extensive experience of deploying IT solutions across industries in our bid to offer these as out of box solutions. These Shrink-wrapped versions are available for:

1. a) OmniDocs Professional
2. b) OmniScan Low Volume
3. c) SAP Image Enablement
4. d) OmniScan for SharePoint
5. OmniScan for SAP

In addition we are also providing our enterprise level solutions on cloud for SMEs. This provides SMEs an option to enjoy the benefits of Newgen’s internationally renowned ECM and BPM solutions without having to invest heavily upfront. They can choose to opt for basic infrastructure with only the required features and functionality and enhance the features based on the business needs. In addition to this, ECM on Cloud also lends an advantage of anywhere anytime availability of information to the SMEs.

We work closely with an exhaustive partner network channel to penetrate deeper into this market. The partner network consists of organizations with a strong regional presence that gives them better accessibility and deeper understanding of this market.,

Cloud has undoubtedly created a buzz in the market. But as a technology enabler or technology provider how do you look at this trend? What are the key parameters for selecting cloud based solution?

With time, cloud computing like any other technology has evolved both in terms of its capabilities as well as business applications. Cloud’s potential for transforming businesses can be far-reaching. Over the next decade cloud computing has the potential to become the foundation of all business growth by creating a new ecosystem of partnerships and innovative business services. As organizations get enamored in the immense cost benefits and enhanced data accessibility through cloud, Everything-as-a-Service era (EaaSe) will engulf the business world. Few trends that will shape up the future of cloud adoption are:-

Hybrid Cloud Models: - Hybrid Cloud Computing will help organizations address the security concerns of cloud platform without compromising on its business benefits. The ability to divide content between public and private cloud will render organizations the flexibility to manage sensitive and non-sensitive information differently.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) will lead the way: - Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) adoption will outgrow Software as a Service (SaaS) adoption in the near future. As industry leaders start viewing cloud from a strategic standpoint, they will realize its immense potential and unique applications for managing internal and external processes. Moving beyond the application mindset, progressive companies will enhance their usage of cloud services by bringing each infrastructure component on cloud including hardware as a service, server as a service, computing as a service, and storage as a service.

Parameters for selecting Cloud based solutions are specific to business requirements. Agility, accessibility, cost efficiency and scalability are the biggest benefits which organizations hope to achieve with Cloud. More and more organizations will take up applications that focus on business priorities than the ones which focus IT priorities – underscoring the value placed by organizations on facilitating delivery of services beyond IT, via Cloud.

Setting up cloud policy is a tough job for most of the enterprise organizations. How do you help your clients who struggle with this?

Cloud represents an opportunity for businesses to share and collaborate on documents, access critical information across any platform or device, without having to make huge initial investments on technology or infrastructure. All expenses for storage management, maintenance and support including hardware and software investments are taken care of by the service provider. Moving the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system into cloud frees it from all spatial and IT infrastructural limitations, providing real-time information access for smarter decision making.

However, migrating an enterprise content management (ECM) system to a cloud infrastructure can be a major undertaking and could prove disastrous without careful planning and strict adherence to the plan. Our cloud based deployments involve enterprise wide involvement and behavioral reinforcement through trainings and workshops for mitigating the risk of non-acceptance and information misuse. Data safety nets through built in system auditing capabilities also go a long way in preventing any kind of information leakage from the system.

Newgen has strategically built a cloud portfolio that allows organizations take complete control of their business. Hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), it provides infinitely scalable storage capacity and a secure access to critical data. We work closely with our customers in carefully planning their cloud strategy, addressing all data centric concerns at the right stage. Our solution experts together with our Cloud service provider make a thorough research and analysis of client’s business requirements and accordingly offer right blend of solutions to them. This has helped the information managers and process architects in successfully mitigating all risks associated with cloud platform.

Which are the industry verticals that are active for Newgen software?

Newgen’s solution suite is being used by organizations spanned across more than 30 industry verticals. We are predominantly focused on Banking, Financial Services, Insurance, BPO/SSC, Government, Manufacturing, Healthcare, Education, Oil & Gas, Legal and Telecom industries. The BFSI segment continues to be one of most important verticals for us with more than 200 banking customers globally. Built on the core ECM and BPM infrastructure of imaging, document management (DM), records management (RM), workflow and process analytics, we offer industry specific composite content applications such as customer on-boarding, loan origination and servicing, claims processing, CRM for Customer Contact Centers, CCM etc. We have got more than 30 soft templates for different processes in BFSI segment to ensure faster implementations. Recently, we have also received increased traction in the Government vertical, driven by the need to ensure transparency and fairness in government functioning.