Covid 19 has taken down business and shot down the markets. Everybody is locked up. Except the bare minimum products, nothing is available freely. The essential services companies like IT & ITeS companies are operating from homes in restricted manner with truncated employees’ strength & productivity. Amid this, there is growing expectation from the business owners about stimulus package from the government and renegotiation on pricing with their IT vendors and partners.
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“We have to wait and watch what customers are going to demand in next 15 days.”
Jitesh T Dave,
Director,
SYSTECH Technocraft Services Pvt. Ltd.
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IT partners, who are backbone of Indian IT system, dependent upon the market on the one side and OEMs on the other side, are various types. Some are hardware dependent; some are software dependent and some have presence in both categories. So, although the impact is there, but the degree of impact will certain be different. But good news is although they are apprehensive about it, they have not lost their hopes.
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“If we go with positivity, we can overcome the situation.”
Kavita Singhal,
Director
Kamtron Systems Pvt. Ltd.
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Kavita Singhal – Director – Kamtron Systems Pvt. Ltd., says, “We are not yet hearing about renegotiation of pricing or AMC form the customers and my cash flow is okay though a bit slow. We have talked to the employees and managed the situation.”
“No one does business with loss, at the end of the year, people do earn. This is the time that we should use that surplus money… what is the issue? We started our business from zero and we should be ready to support our extended family (our employees),” she added.
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“Let’s be positive and think positive.”
Manasi Saha,
Director,
Macaws Infotech
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She maintained, “If we go with positivity, we can overcome the situation. My entire team is working from home. Personally, I think, if we support our customers and create a relation with them, this will help us in a long run. Besides human tend to forget everything gradually. But if we want to adopt, we need to find out ways and means.”
Kamtron Systems is hugely into information security and cloud business and its major customer base revolves around education segment though the company has a sizable customer in various other segments too.
Manasi Saha, Director, Macaws Infotech, “As far as Macaws Infotech is concerned, I am worried about the outstanding in the market and aftermath of the pandemic. How it pans out will be a deciding factor for my organization’s growth.”
“At present the customers are not ready to pay though we are supporting the customers on the advice of the OEMs for extension of renewals. Three months – from March to May – are not at all productive from the business perspective. This is a concern for a lot of other people also,” Manasi added.
“We have not been paid by the customers during these days, though they are of opinion that they would pay after the lockdown is over. I have customers in every segment in this region. If the overall business is down, then the impact will be worst,” she maintained.
There is also news in the market that the customers are asking for renegotiation of pricing.
Jitesh T Dave, Director, SYSTECH Technocraft Services Pvt. Ltd., says, “It is so far so good for us. We have not come to a stage where customers are asking us for renegotiation but yes, I am hearing a lot from others about price model and specially around support and service contracts.”
“But I think it is too early for us to paint the situation with a single brush. Therefore, I do not think every customer would do the same thing. This is a passing phase. Things would be clearer by the mid of next month when businesses start opening. The question would be how fast would we adapt to change,” he maintained.
“People should understand if you are operating a company with 20-25 people, you would take at least 2-3 days to come out with any decision, think about government of India,” he added.
As per Jitesh, by and large companies would certainly do a lot of investment around security which are ease to access. People will have to keep in mind that considering the mindset of the CISOs and CIOs that they will not go ahead and invest in technologies for stop-gap arrangement, they will have to look at the long-term effect. They will look at the future similar situation if at all it occurs and what all add on benefits they will get. So whatever knowledge session they take they would certainly take the guidelines from their top management as to what are the technology they need to invest considering all their business are impacted no matter what industry they are in. So, the top management would validate any investment they do whether it is on IT or non-IT.
The CIOs, CTOs or CISOs have this challenging task ahead that they must convince their management that whatever projection they had in terms of technology investment in last quarter have to redefined now.
IT is an enabler. Top management would like to see if the preparedness is there till the last mile of the company. If their data is secure? Are they investing in technology which would help them acquire more customers? Are they investing in technology which enables them for a shorter customer acquisition cycle? Are they able to do any value addition to their customers? They would not want to lose any customers.
As per Jitesh, those solutions can be around three aspects.
- Ease to use: The solutions should be such that it would give no resistance in terms of user experience.
- It should be secure: They would not want to compromise on data security.
- It should be scalable. It means as the company overcomes the crisis, they can scale up the solution easily without any hassles.
Further, the customers would not like to put all their eggs in a single basket. Industry will take a call based on their experience from vendor to vendor perspective. People will now go full blown towards adopting newer ways of technology. Time is essence: no customer can afford to spend much time in evaluating a single vendor. They must take quick decisions and move ahead. Otherwise, their competition would surpass them and take an edge.
Every business has been impacted. The revenue, cash flow and orders have been impacted. In fact, the lockdown Version 1.0 had not have much impact as we had only 11 official days to work as rest were some sort of holiday, but Version 2.0 of lockdown is going to decide the magnitude of impact. Thank god govt. has relaxed some of the industries to operation post 20th looking at their role in the situation.
Systech has been focusing on the BFSI sector being a security provider. The company has real healthy clientele. So also, the company has the pharma and academics. The company wishes to add more and more customers and keep supporting the customers.
Finally…
Jitesh concludes, “We all would have to wait and watch what customers are going to demand in next fifteen days to a month’s time.
Manashi says, “Are we ready for the remote work or remote education. We do not even have proper infrastructure. She concludes: “Let’s be positive and think positive.”
Kavita concludes, “We are not thinking that the country is in problem rather people are keen to open their offices as IT services are under lockdown relaxation terms.”
