“We are at the forefront of innovation with born-in-the-cloud enterprise applications”- Mr. Samir Bodas, CEO & Co-Founder, Icertis
CEO & Co-Founder of Icertis Samir Bodas shares his views with Technuter.com:
When and how the idea of Icertis flourished?
Sitting in Seattle – a city where two of the largest global cloud vendors are based – Microsoft and Amazon, we saw the cloud wave coming very early in the last decade. I was working as the CEO of Aztecsoft – which got acquired by MindTree and our other Co-founder Monish Dardawas working at a senior position in BladeLogic – which got acquired by BMC Software. From our experience we knew that to build a successful venture an entrepreneur has to either create a wave or ride an existing one.You really have to be the likes of Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg to create the wave and hence, we choose to ride the wave. The First step was asking the relevant questions like ‘What should we do in cloud?’, ‘Which business functions should be put in cloud?’ After careful analyzing the market, we realized that many organizations are still facing challenges in terms of contract management – lack of automation, resulting in revenue leakages, escalating costs and higher risks. So, we decided to build cloud based software for such functions which we term as ERP surround (enterprise software that need to be accessed externally by vendors, partners, customers or devices). And that’s how Icertis came into existence in 2009.
Incidentally, Microsoft Corporation was looking for a solution for resolution of their contractual concerns worldwide during the same time. Having spent my formulative years with Microsoft, I was confident that our product, Icertis Contract Management (ICM) can solve the pain areas and achieve the desired objectives for Microsoft. Microsoft uses our software for managing multiple types of contracts, including partner incentive contracts and non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) worldwide, amounting to more than a million-plus agreements. At present, we have a very diverse set of customers worldwide such as Janney Montgomery Scott, Questcor, Hyundai Autoever, bwin.party, KPIT and Genpact.
Last year, extending our ERP surround strategy, apart from contract management, we developed three more products – Transportation Management, Public Transport Management and Fleet Management. And now, we have developed Big Data and Analytics overlay on all these products to offer critical and actionable insights to enable effective decision making for CXOs and executives.
Would you please reflect upon your products & offerings?
Icertis has so far successfully launched the following innovative products on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform to address specific business needs of the enterprise:
- Icertis Contract Management
- Icertis Transportation Management
- Icertis Fleet Management
- Icertis PublicTransport Management
Icertis Contract Management (ICM) is a comprehensive contract management system that helps businesses manage their complete contract lifecycle and empowers them to effectively manage compliance. The system leverages a clause and template library with a robust approval rules engine to enforce strong governance on contracts, drives compliance using contract commitment tracking and significantly enhances productivity and adoption using an inspired user interface. Contract management is a key leverage that can not only significantly impact revenues and bottom line but also influence viability and sustainability of a business.
Icertis Transportation Management (ITM) is a next generation cloud native transportation management system providing a comprehensive functionality to address all aspects of transportation planning and operations with the features of integration to in-vehicle systems, demand driven route planning and the ease of use. This full-featured product leverages optimization capabilities to deliver value to customers by reducing freight costs and help improve the overall productivity of the function and contribute to superior business performance.
Icertis Fleet Management (IFM) is a next generation cloud native fleet management system that addresses all the challenges of managing fleet operations. This comprehensive product leverages the maintenance management capability that helps customers improve fleet uptime and productivity while reducing maintenance costs. IFM helps manage the complete fleet lifecycle from induction to disposal while helping customers to manage not only the lifecycle costs but also the compliance requirements.
Icertis PublicTransport Management(IPM)Built on Windows Azure, the product enables city and inter-city bus operators to manage their complex operations in a sustainable and profitable manner, while offering world class service to passengers in a safe and secure way. The product is the only end-to-end capability offering in the bus transport space in India.Deployment of the Icertis PublicTransport product helps operators to have access to intelligent analytics to enable effective tactical planning and real time operational control.
What is the USP of Icertis products?
We are at the forefront of innovation with born-in-the-cloud enterprise applications that are easy to deploy, easy to use and easy to integrate with line of business application. Icertis is changing the game for “ERP surround” applications in enterprise contract management and transportation management that are faster, better, inexpensive to deploy and maintain and leverage the cloud to deliver critical services to the extended enterprise. With advanced prescriptive analytics that allow more informed decisions and powerful “what-if” scenarios, Icertis is delivering value to customers worldwide.
Our products can be implemented in less than 60 days on cloud deployment. Some of the benefits that our customers have achieved using our solutions are:
- 50% improvement in contract turnaround time
- 30% reduction in contract administration costs
- Up to 50% increase in contract compliance
- 20% savings in freight spend
What are the major Industry verticals targeted by Icertis?
Icertis has 25+customers globally across its portfolio of offerings. Our existing customersare mainly fromBFSI, Manufacturing, Pharmaceutical, Automotive and Third Party Logistic providers.
Do you plan any significant market expansion in near future?
Yes, we are hoping to get larger share of the market pie. We have shown a 400% growth in customer additions over last 2 years, adding 8 enterprise clients globally in the first quarter of 2014 itself– charting an impressive journey of 5 years, 250 + employees and 5 offices across North America, India and Singapore. Infact, we are now working with Fortune 1000 companies by implementing cloud native products and solutions addressing their specific business needs.
In the coming years, we plan to increase our market share in North America while gain significant footprint in Europe and APAC.
What is Icertis doing differently to increase its market share in India?
With more and more Indian companies going global, need for new generation IT system to enhance customer relations and operations is rising tremendously. India is amongst our top markets in the world and in the next 5-7 years, we envisage Indian corporates to invest more on technology than any other country. To capitalize on this growing opportunity, we are increasing our footprint by hiring more workforce – 30% of our current sales workforce is dedicated only on India and through partner GTM eco-system. Further, we have also formed strategic alliances with large system integrators. For eg: we are working with KPIT and Infosys BPO to expand Icertis reach to global customers, allowing us to scale and add value to their services offerings for the enterprise.
