Indraneel Fuke, Director, Bhea Technologies is one of the very few entrepreneurs who is kicked about open source. At the turn of the century, when giants like IBM and Oracle backed the open source movement, there was a lot of enthusiasm and optimism surrounding it. Here was a movement that could stand up to the existing power structure of proprietary technologies like Microsoft and Apple that inhibited innovation or restricted it only to their ecosystem of products and solutions. However, despite the movement hitting a plateau, Google with Android and others are starting to put life back into open source.
Customer Care
It is in this backdrop that Fuke decided to start Bhea Technologies. Bhea specialises in consulting and implementation of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system for organisations. Evaluating and selecting a business critical application such as CRM can be a challenging task. One needs a proven solution with the right fit in terms of cost, benefits and a partner that has sound understanding of your business domain. Bhea Technologies has offices in Singapore, Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi and Nagpur, has extensive expertise in rolling out SugarCRM and has helped over 150 customers to expand market, grow revenue and retain customers. Bhea counts TechLiveConnect - India an IT and BPO company, Shriram Properties - India, Geometric Ltd - US/India, NetMagic Telecom - India, Banyan Tree Group in Singapore, Baiduri Bank in Brunei as some of its customers.
Like a host of other companies, Bhea is riding the e-commerce boon witnessed in India and has solutions for this marketplace. With the adoption of Internet both by enterprises and individuals, businesses have expanded their reach across the borders and proliferation of the Internet facilitates this. “We provide complete online store solutions which allow businesses to grow cross borders,” says Fuke. The company counts William Penn, the pen store and others as some of its ecommerce customers.
Initial challenges
In India, 75 per cent of the businesses are still using primitive methods such as excel sheets and emails for managing their customer data. This presents both a great business opportunity and a challenge. While the opportunity is evident in terms of a large green field market, the challenge is that many organisations are not aware of the more efficient systems like CRM to manage their customer data. “We need to educate the customers about CRM and how it can transform their business, before suggesting a solution. As a result, in many cases sales cycles are longer,” says Fuke. While the company has taken baby steps and bagged a few clients in the CRM segment, it still has a long way to go.
Uniqueness of the idea
When asked about the uniqueness of the idea, Fuke is of the opinion that the concept of CRM itself is not unique. “An organisation has customers it is already doing customer relationship tasks i.e. managing their customer interaction data either manually, using paper-pen system, or in a limited automated way using excel sheets and emails,” he says. However, only a small portion of organisations, especially in the SMB sector, realize the fundamental way in which a strong CRM system can transform their business for the better. Moreover, leveraging open source technology, with products such as SugarCRM, this transformation is possible at a reasonable investment that gives a good Return on Investment (ROI). This has resulted in growth and in the last 3 years, we have been growing at more than 100 per cent, asserts Fuke. Since, it is a startup, financials details are private.
Raised money
The company did not disclose the quantum of money raised in the initial rounds as a condition from its private investors; however, we it added that it was more of an initial round of angel investment. Bhea is looking for more funding to drive its future growth plans, says Fuke.
Learnings
One of the key leanings that Fuke shares with regard to his company is the fact that the Indian customer is savvy, who is willing to learn and adopt new solutions for taking his business to the next level and at the same time having acute sense of value of money. “Learning from our experience over the last seven years, we have fine tuned our business model so that we are well equipped to serve this market,” says Fuke.
Future Plans
Today, we are expanding in two ways - introducing new products such as open source telephony solutions. We also work in open source technologies such as, Asterisk based telephony solution, Open Source ERP, Joomla/Drupal/Expression Engine based Content Management Systems, etc. for our core India market and expanding in overseas market such as Singapore and Australia. Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables a user to build web sites and online applications. It is based on open source standards.
While the company has grown admirably over the last few years, challenges around open source adoption remains, which in turn could impact Bhea’s growth.