Barrier for SMBs in Finding Market for their Products

We spoke to Shailender Kumar, MD, Oracle India about the current IT trends in the Indian SMBs, the major business and technology obstacle and the methods and solutions that can ease out the challenges and boost the business of SMBs.

India is the third largest base of technology startups. According to the Economic Survey 2015-16, the number of technology startups has grown by 40 percent to over 4,200 in number. The same survey also states that as in January 2016, India had 19,400 tech enabled startups. In terms of total number of startups, India is amongst the top five largest hosts in the world.

The Challenges                                                    

The technology has a huge role in making this startup revolution possible. The technology emboldened these people behind these startups to make their visions, which seemed impossible, a reality. “Most of these startups are app based, so the cloud has been an integral part of this revolution. Not just the development and hosting part, even the security aspects also heavily dependent upon technology,” said Shailender Kumar, MD, Oracle India.

Small & Medium businesses (SMBs) play a very important role in any country’s progress and India is no exception to it. With majority of the population residing in tier 2 and tier 3 cities, SMBs are aiding in the development of the most remote parts of the country. “Having said that, SMBs are facing huge challenges in the form of finance crunch, increasing competition, technology obsolescence, regulatory and compliance issues, they also face a huge barrier in finding market for their products,” said Kumar.

Technology plays a central part in any organization today and so is the case for SMBs. But because of many reasons like shortage of funds, lack of knowledge, SMBs face roadblocks in catching up on technology. Some of the SMBs are still using old technology which results in not only in less profit but also loss of scalability for them.

Procuring technology that would cater to their current requirements and would grow with their business within their budgets is one of the key challenges that SMBs are facing today.

Breaking the Barriers

Midsize companies need to make sure that their solution provider supports the way they actually do business. “SMBs are more susceptible than large enterprises to fluctuations in revenue — based on market trends, timing, and the buying behavior of a few key customers — which directly impacts their ability to invest in new technologies,” remarked Kumar.

Various IT companies uses the same technologies for both on premise and SaaS applications, which means that SMBs run same standards in both deployment scenarios. Thus, with the new-fangled cloud solutions, SMBs customers have the freedom to leverage existing on premise investments as they gradually move workload to the cloud.

It’s also important to understand that every SMBs has a relationship with people at large. That’s what should be the business model of every IT cloud provider companies. HCM has been showing maximum traction amongst the SaaS stack for SMBs. 75% of the Oracle customer base globally falls under $500 million, which comes under SMBs.

The Roadmap

Given the demand for cloud in the Indian market, Oracle has been trying to change their perception amongst SMEs and is able to hook in good number of growing customers. “SMEs are one of the biggest focus areas for Oracle’s cloud business in India. Oracle is increasingly focusing on tier 2 and tier 3 cities. We are opening offices in Hyderabad, Kolkata, Ahmedabad and Pune,” concluded Kumar.