Virender Jeet, Sr. VP – Technology at Newgen Software, sums up year 2014 and discusses the company’s goals for 2015.
Major trends in 2014
2014 has been the year of Digital Transformation. Initially driven by compliance requirements, digitization and process automation have now become essential for productivity and work efficiency. The nexus of forces – SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud) is driving this global change by introducing several operational and strategic innovations in businesses across industries.
Highlighted below are some the emerging trends:-
Mobility – With the rise in penetration of mobile devices across geographies and customer segments, enterprise mobility has become an indispensable component of any business strategy. Organizations have introduced mobility in their business process management frameworks to get closer to their customers and enable key stakeholders to collaborate freely 24×7.
Social Media – The pervasiveness of social media has made it an important business platform. Smart IT frameworks facilitate collaborative work environment by leveraging social media platform to engage with the customers and other internal and external stakeholders.
Analytics – Expanding the scope of process analytics to encompass predictive analytics tools along with real-time Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) within the IT framework is resulting in enhanced operational intelligence, improved visibility and business responsiveness.
Cloud – Collaboration amongst key stakeholders, business leaders, analysts, process owners, and business users was a key to continuous process improvement. Cloud platform is enabling this real-time collaboration amongst users to create operational excellence.
Client wins, sales, volume, revenue growth, people, reach and geographies
There have been many significant achievements for us in 2014. We have forayed into newer geographies independently and through our partner network. Especially in the US, we have seen a notable increase in our client base, while we have consolidated our leadership position in India. Focused on innovation, Newgen has ventured into many new verticals through its innovative product portfolio. Our point solutions for stringent regulatory mandates such as Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) have helped banks and financial institutions effectively monitor customer accounts and thus adhere to the compliance.
Newgen became the only Indian company to be featured in all four Gartner Magic Quadrant reports including Gartner Critical Capabilities report for case management framework, iBPMS, ECM and CCM. In 2014, Gartner recognized Newgen as a ‘Visionary’ in the 2014 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management based on our strong product roadmap. In terms of revenue, we have successfully achieved close to 30 percent growth this year. While winning many awards for our successful implementations, Newgen has strengthened its position as a leader in the Indian IT industry. We have also added many new features to our existing product portfolio, having launched our intelligent business process management suite (ibpms) with active, on-demand, and predictive analytics, support for social media interactions, and complex event processing capabilities.
Another major achievement for us in 2014 has been the introduction of new investors. Considering Newgen’s continued and rapid growth globally, IDG Ventures India and Ascent Capital have come together to partner with us in our journey forward.
How Newgen won customers in 2014
We have concocted several levels of strategy in 2014 to win new customer accounts and maintain our leadership position. We have expanded our core team of Sales and Marketing professionals to more than 200 people who are together working as brand ambassadors for the growth and expansion of the organization. We have increased our marketing budget significantly and are enhancing our visibility and mindshare by participating in all major trade events and undertaking focused digital marketing initiatives. We have also put some muscle behind creating an effective partner ecosystem to expand our indirect sales funnel. Focused GTM programs and marketing campaigns adopted for promotion and evangelization of our products and solutions in different verticals have proved to be extremely successful.
Good and bad moments in the market in 2014
The year 2014 was one of the best years for ECM-BPM Enterprise software market as it was marked by the advent of new age technologies such as SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud) which revolutionized the industry landscape. Enterprises turned their focus on customer experience and were game enough to take risks in their quest to innovate their customer service programs. Newgen was duly recognized for its efforts in the ECM space by getting positioned as a ‘Visionary’ in the Gartner Magic Quadrant Report 2014. We were able to acquire some key accounts globally and enter into strategic alliances that are sure to propel us to greater heights in times to come. Some industries however experienced a slump in the demand for end-to-end BPM or ECM systems, as they opted for disparate point solutions.
Your focus areas and strategies in 2014
In 2014 we focused on technology upgrades pertaining to the user interface, deployment efficiency and core features and functionality which can help our customers reap maximum business benefits from our products. We have developed many new CCAs across our target verticals such as BFSI, healthcare, BPO and government to be able to penetrate further and gain market leadership. For this, we have also strengthened our partner base as well as expand our direct presence across geographies.
Trends to watch in 2015
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 business strategies. The demand for reliable and cost-effective technology platforms which can provide organizations with flexible and scalable growth capabilities will be on the rise in 2015.
In an effort to create operational efficiency and process standardization, end-to-end solutions will be preferred over silos of business applications which run independently. The growing phenomena of social, mobile, cloud and analytics will continue to further fuel the dynamic environment. We have, thus tried to leverage these new age technologies to enhance our product suite. Our solutions have built-in social collaboration capabilities that allow business 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.
Newgen’s expansion and investment plans in 2015
In terms of market expansion, we have initiated plans to create greater traction in the US and Europe. We are also deepening engagements in the Middle East, Africa and APAC regions.
On the technology front, we will continue to invest good fraction of our revenue to create innovative products and solutions while adding more diverse capabilities to our existing suite of products. Focus on SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics, and Cloud) will begin resonating across most of our product lines. We envision a 6-8 percent growth in our cloud based offerings in the next one year.
New strategies for 2015
Having consolidated our position in 2014 as one of the leading IT solutions provider, with over 1100+ installations across 58 countries, we now want to increase our market penetration further by expanding our direct presence across various regions, for which we have aggressive expansion plans. As a step in this direction we have opened new offices in Singapore, Canada and Florida to bolster our sales efforts. We are targeting aggressive growth in the US market with greater focus on cloud computing technologies for enterprise solutions in ECM, BPM, CCM and ACM space. We see rampant growth in the US to continue for the next 3 years. Going forward, we are planning to further expand our reach in North America, with particular focus on healthcare, shared services centers, government apart from BFSI. We also have planned to expand our network of partners for specific verticals and geographies in 2015.
Rajani Baburajan
