Austin, US-based Epicor Software Corporation, a global provider of industry-specific software, which has been in existence for 40 years, has 20,000 customers across 150 countries, 3,800 employees and $800 million worth of revenue, on Thursday announced the appointment of Redington India as its country-wide distributor to push business growth and meet the demand for enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions in India. As a result, Redington India, one of India’s largest technology product distributors, will select and train specialist resellers from its network of over 20,000 business partners to help expand Epicor’s customer base.

Sabby Gill, Executive Vice-President, International, Epicor, spoke to BusinessLine in detail on the partnership and the evolving business scenario in India. Excerpts:

Tell us about this partnership with Redington.

We are officially announcing that Epicor’s primary go-to market in India will be through Redington, from a distribution perspective. Redington will become our distributor in India for ERP. They have over 20,000 channel partners. We’re working closely with them to identify the most appropriate partners within their entire portfolio that have ERP experience and we are working with those organisations now, to train them up, to certify them in our products, both from a sales perspective and implementation perspective and have those individuals supported through our local operations here in India, to then go and sell those products across the regions that Redington has, which are basically North, South, East and West in India.

The whole idea with Redington is about speed market, because they have the channel partners and have an established name and presence in India. If you can imagine having to do that myself, it would take me a long time to get anywhere near that.

So, it’s more important to have the right partner, with the right skill set, very much aligned to our values and our go to market. But, we don’t expect them to do it on their own.

So, we will augment it. We have local resources here that we hired and we’re investing in it to support Redington. In addition to that, here in Bengaluru (Bellandur Road), we have a technology centre that we established over the last two years, where we have 425 employees.

We’re just opening up another facility in February 2018. We expect to hire another 100 people between now and the end of next year.

Tell us about your focus areas in manufacture.

Our focus area is really around small medium enterprises. We believe there’s a big opportunity here in India, based on the number of organisations that fit into our key industry vertical, because when you think about manufacturing, most people think of manufacturing as a business, or a sector or an industry.

We look at it really as sub-verticals within manufacturing. So, when you think of pharmaceuticals or fabricated metals or electronic components, every single one of those different industries and business units has specific requirements, for say, regular reporting, from a compliance perspective.... and those are the things that we do extremely well. And that’s the reason why we boast of 20,000 customers on a global basis.

What makes you confident that India is a good market for you?

Our niche is manufacturing; and because of the initiatives that have been going on like ‘Make in India’, ‘Digital India’, we believe that we are extremely well-positioned to tackle that small medium business enterprise market. Over 32 million organisations exist within India that fit into that small medium enterprise market, and that’s where we believe there’s a big opportunity.

A few days back India went up the ladder on the ease of doing business. What has been your experience in India?

Personally, I believe things are a lot easier, otherwise we wouldn’t be investing from an Epicor perspective and setting up the technology centres and continue to invest in all of the resources the way we are doing here.

Also, with the introduction of things like GST and all of these components around “Make In India” and all of the different initiatives trying to bring in foreign investment, it is going to expand the operations and make life easier, not only for us as suppliers but also for everyday individuals, people as they consume information, data and the supply chains. So, as far as we are concerned, it is easier.

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