As the pandemic triggers a manifold jump in demand for cloud solutions, GOFRUGAL expects to double its cloud business every year for the next three years by ensuring smooth cloud migration and addressing data protection worries.
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“To speed up implementation time, enterprises will increasingly adopt hybrid multi-cloud service. Businesses will continue to harness the benefits of AI/ML, be more sustainable, and enjoy the freedom to choose from the private or public cloud for increased flexibility.”
Anupama Kadambi,
CXO, Chief Experience Officer,
GOFRUGAL
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The Cloud technology has been gaining momentum over the last several years. But the Pandemic and the ensuing shift to online operations and massive adoption of work-from-home-culture and online learning gave it a much needed shot in the arm. As the India market remains in the eye of a major digital transformation buoyed by a tech-centred Union Budget, SME Channels embarks upon recording the voices of the who’s who of the Cloud scape.
As part of our effort to make the voices of major cloud players heard by the channel community, we have brought in this for you as first of a series of Cloud Predictions by major vendors and stakeholders of the cloud industry.
In a special interaction with SME Channels, Anupama Kadambi, CXO, Chief Experience Officer, GOFRUGAL,, reveals her organization’s strategy for growing the cloud industry, his predictions for the industry in 2022 and his vision and plans for the channel community. Edited excerpts…
The pandemic has forced businesses to take a giant leap to go online. As a leading cloud player, how do you plan to leverage the immense market opportunity created by the pandemic?
The pandemic has reiterated the need for businesses to innovate continually, evolve, and build agility to survive and succeed in these chaotic times and competitive markets. There has been a clear acceleration of the adoption of cloud and online. Another major driver has been the need to work and manage all operations remotely. Business of all sizes and styles have benefited upgrading to the cloud as data was centralized. They were able to access data anywhere, anytime and on any device. This cloud elasticity has given them the freedom to scale up or down.
The transition to the cloud has also made it easier for businesses to consolidate their inventory. A unified view of inventory has helped them cater to different fulfillment options, manage channel-wise pricing or suggested selling. Cloud technology has been a catalyst to drive such digital transformation.
Our customers have been using ERP on cloud for retail and restaurants for more than a decade. For regional, national or enterprise chains, we were pioneers to provide hybrid HQ (headquarters) solutions so that chain businesses could manage their operations centrally. We have secured more than 3,000+ businesses with cloud real time back-up service BaaS that automates the data back-up and recovery. With data on cloud, businesses can leverage on SmartReports and Reporting app insights for agile and accurate decision-making. Our DMS (Distribution Management Solution) on cloud is in pilot stage and we plan to launch it soon. We are introducing IoT, AI, ML, and NLP in our solutions so that decisions can be recommended. We are reimagining the business processes for the digital era and redesigning a new generation of digital-native solutions. Finally, we plan on increased focus on digital and offline marketing and channel development to reach a wider audience.
As a major cloud player, what market trends do you foresee in 2022? What major channel trends for cloud would you forecast for the year 2022?
2022 will see continuous innovations, as services will start moving to the cloud as it will be faster with easy onboarding and will provide the lowest cost of ownership too.
Demand for cloud solutions, among SMEs, has increased manyfold due to the pandemic. Data protection worries have been the impediment for cloud adoption by SMEs. We expect our cloud business, nevertheless, to double every year for the next three years.
To speed up implementation time, enterprises will increasingly adopt hybrid multi-cloud service. Businesses will continue to harness the benefits of AI/ML, be more sustainable, and enjoy the freedom to choose from the private or public cloud for increased flexibility.
Besides transitioning to the cloud, there will be an increase in the adoption of mobile for store operations from ordering, delivery, goods-inward automation, stock-audit, stock-pick, and stock-refill, ordering, self-service kiosks, queue buster app, and endless aisle. The cloud transition will benefit all stakeholders from employees, partners, vendors, and consumers.
Please shed some light on your cloud offerings. What is the USP of your offerings?
Gofrugal offers cloud and mobile ERP solutions for retail, restaurant and distribution businesses. Most MSMEs and the Kiranas are hesitant to explore and upgrade to the cloud. The chief barrier is the need to migrate data to a new system that is harder as it is consumer’s time, money and effort. We specialize in this, as our solutions are designed to help them plan and manage this change in simple steps with less time, effort and no disruption to their business.
One other reason for the slow adoption is the concerns about data protection. We have launched a utility called GoSecure Private Key to help businesses protect their valuable business data from unauthorized access. By doing away with default passwords, people-generated passwords, and risk of shared passwords. It involves a unique, machine-generated password known only to the systems for database access. The threat of data copying by current or ex-employees, service providers or hackers is completely eliminated by this solution.
We offer complete transparency with a 30-day free trial, freedom of choice on deployment/hardware/software, tools to speed-up implementation/manage retail-staff attrition with weekly and easy, fast, agile product updates. Our tools and solutions help businesses scale fast by adding new stores and going live with the least skill, time/effort for accurate and efficient decision-making. We continue to invest in R&D and enhance our products and solutions by aligning them to the market needs so that our customers enjoy the lowest total cost of ownership with our solutions.
Would you please brief us on the kind of service support you extend to your channel partners? What sort of pre as well as post-sales support do you offer to your partners? Since cloud is a tech-intensive product, it requires proper skilling.
We are as much customer-centric as we are partner-oriented. Being in a consultative business selling, our collaborative approach varies as per the Partnership Engagement. Our ARRP (Assure returns partners program) focuses on joint work with partners to identify the necessary skill set to spot the opportunity, develop the market, till they experience the ‘first moment of profit’.
With MyDelight app, we empower our partners to collaborate, learn and acquire the skill set faster. We also conduct regular skill-up sessions where partners get first-hand experience of our solutions. Our in-house learning app has more than 1000+ courses, self-help material where partners can sign-up certify before they engage in the market. We are also in the process of launching a developer platform so they could enjoy the freedom to innovate and extend their solution capability as well.
In short, we are taking our partners and customers to a fairy tale ending where things get cloudy with a chance of meatballs!
