In a chat with VARINDIA, Srikant Rao, Founder Director, Affordable Business Solutions (ABS), discusses the company’s association with Microsoft, how they have scaled up, their differentiating factor and the growth trajectory 
 

Focusing on the SMC market, ABS started its journey in 2005 offering solutions based on hosted subscription model, which has been hugely supported by Microsoft. The partnership has helped ABS to sustain in the difficult times and emerge into a matured business as well.   

“ABS entered into a business relationship with Microsoft in 2005. As first-generation entrepreneurs, we had just started our operations then with a vision of addressing the Indian SMC (small, medium and corporate) market with business solutions offered on a hosted subscription model.”

For over a decade, we have effectively pioneered a Cloud Computing business addressing the SME (small and medium enterprises) market segment in India. Microsoft has been, and continues to be, the mainstay of our entire business. Our partnership with Microsoft has enabled us to survive several cycles of economic growth and downturns and has resulted in us becoming a very mature business entity with a platform that is all set for significant growth,” recollects Srikant Rao, Founder Director, Affordable Business Solutions. 

In the initial days, the Microsoft team has extended its support to ABS as a principal vendor to offer ERP solutions to the Indian SME community. Microsoft has always prioritized the requirements of SMC customers.   

“When we started ABS with a vision of offering ERP solutions on what is now called the Cloud, to Indian SME customers, Microsoft was the one principal who shared and supported these plans. The Microsoft team has always been extremely responsive to the requirements of our SMC customer base.

“The product ‘stack’ – that includes D365 ERP+CRM, Power BI, Office 365, SharePoint Portal and Azure – that Microsoft offers enables us to offer comprehensive industry vertical solutions that are extremely user-friendly and easy to adopt,” explains Rao. 

Microsoft helping partners to scale up business

Microsoft appointed ABS as its first Microsoft Service Provider Licence Agreement (SPLA) partner for Microsoft Dynamics in India way back in 2005. Taking it further, Microsoft has also supported the company in training, marketing, sales, solution creation and customer support. Moreover, ABS was also involved in some of Microsoft’s projects like Project Vikas, which was Microsoft’s pioneering attempt to build and offer solutions to Tirupur’s garment industry on a SaaS model.

“Although we were relatively a very small partner in terms of revenue, we were privileged to have very cordial and supportive relationships with all the senior members of Microsoft’s India team, right from Ravi Venkatesan who was at that point of time the Chairman of Microsoft India.

The Microsoft India team continues to work closely with us to understand and meet the expectations of the SMC customers in India that we have been targeting,” says Rao.  

Differentiating Factor

Leveraging the experience of more than a decade, ABS builds their solutions to meet the requirements of Indian SMC segment. Explaining this, Rao says, “Our solutions have been built based on our learning from over a decade and a half of addressing over 100+ customers in the Indian SMC segment. We also provide business process and analytics consulting as we have senior people with domain and business expertise and experience in these segments.

With pre-configured solutions that have already been proven across multiple customers, ABS Baadal enables us to offer what we called “Rapid Activation” (rather than the traditional long-drawn implementation cycles) to enable customers to go live in days rather than months. Our latest implementation was done in a record of 32 days.”

Growth

In spite of economic slowdowns, ABS has been witnessing a double-digit growth across the last decade. The company is now preparing itself to offer ABS Baadal, a suite of industry vertical solutions on Microsoft D365 on Azure.  

“We are aligned with Microsoft’s sales organizations that reach out to customers through the Enterprise, SMC and SME sales teams and have completely aligned this approach with our own business strategy. Microsoft’s new One Commercial Partner (OCP) Channel Support model is also proving to be extremely productive as we now have a single partner support organization enabling partners like us across the entire stack of products, and also mentoring and guiding us to work with the rest of the organization.

We have successfully proven that we can work with and deliver solutions to large, enterprise customers with both nation-wide and global implementations.
“We anticipate that our suite of industry vertical solutions ABS Baadal, along with our ‘Rapid Activation’ model, should help us double our business every 2–3 years,” concludes Rao. 

Products & Solutions

ABS offers a suite of solutions – branded ABS Baadal – that address the following industry verticals:

•    FMCG/ Distribution/ Retail
•    Component Manufacturers
•    Equipment Manufacturers
•    Professional Services
•    NGOs and Non-Profit
•    Agro and Food Processing

Microsoft helped us move our entire suite of solutions onto Azure in order to provide a safe, secure, scalable and easily manageable cloud infrastructure. Microsoft also helps us by referring us to prospective customers – enterprise and SMC / SME – which are looking for reliable partners with proven solutions in the segments that we target.