Big or small, running a company is not that different - the Ramco Systems story

Ramco systems recently launched a Human Capital Management (HCM) system and it's launch event was held in Bangalore. This cloud based human resource tool is aimed at helping businesses with a large workforce to organize and monitor them as well as efficiently utilize their resources. Mr. Virender Aggarwal, CEO, Ramco Systems, said, “The Enterprise Cloud market is growing rapidly with adoption across organizations of all sizes. Our investments in technology and our focus towards bringing Mobility, Gen-Y User interface, role-based Work Spaces and In-memory engine into a Cloud-based offering has helped us carve a niche position, globally."

Virendra shared that the ERP solutions providers landscape is slowly moving towards the trend where parts of a complete ERP system can be run off the cloud. He said, "I think managing sales force was one of the first move of this kind. This field is pretty much saturated and there are definite market leaders in this space. With our experience in the ERP business ourselves, Human Capital Management was an unsolved pain point. Gartner is projecting a $10 billion HCM market by 2015, with $4 billion in talent management, 75% of that market coming from SaaS. At Ramco, we have been offering an on-premise HCM software globally, and it now runs in 300+ organizations, including customers with employee size of 100,000+. With making our cloud based HCM Gen - Y friendly, by adding tight social and mobile integration, our focus for the coming year is to make this a large business vertical within Ramco Systems.

Big or small, the problems are the same 

Virendra shared that the problem for any company in the ERP space, startup or a large enterprise, is the same; sales and marketing. Virendra says, "You know, we engineers think that we will build the product and because of the merit of the product, people will come begging for it. But the world doesn't work that way. Sales and marketing is our biggest hurdle when it comes to this business." Virendra shared that Ramco Systems spends about $100,000 USD every month on online advertisements. Apart from this, Virendra further shared that the company presents at events and does numerous trade shows through the year. When asked about a startup's barrier to entry in the ERP space, Virendra reiterated, "It is never a technology problem. Startups can build as good products as an enterprise can. The problem lies in having the financial muscle to promote the product and get it to reach to the right target audience."

Virendra further shared that Ramco Systems strives to work like a startup in itself. He says, "I think the advantages of being a flat organization is well known and we are always trying to make the most of it. We're a fairly small team (about 1700 people) and we're looking to be lean all the time. There is no hard and fast hierarchy that people have to adhere to and it is one of the best places to work at. Of course, we only hire the best. We just retained 15 interns from BITS Pilani and you'll see a lot of graduates from premier institutions working for us." The CEO even took the time to show me the culture presentation that is shown to the new recruits of the company.

Virendra left quickly, as he had a flight to catch. But he left me with the realization that the startup way of life and work is now slowly being universally embraced, even by the billion dollar corporates. More large scale companies adopting this work culture can only mean a larger prevalence of a performance driven culture.Now that can't be bad, can it?