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 Having
carved a niche for itself in India, Bangalore-based CRM company,
Trivium Systems, now plans to extend its frontiers to the
A-PAC market. To this end, it has entered into an alliance
with Singapore-based Tecsol to have an indirect presence in
the region. Tecsol, a dominant player in the regional market,
will market Trivium’s products and also provide integration
and support services for the latter’s products in the
region. With this initiative, the company expects A-PAC to
account for over 15 percent of its revenues. At present US,
accounts for around 60 percent of its revenues while Europe
and India account for the rest.
“The
SME segment in countries such as Singapore and Malaysia is
a progressive market for our product—SimpleRM. Apart
from meeting the linguistic needs—which is English, the
product also suits them owing to the cost effectiveness and
simplicity of its implementation,” says Amitabh Saran,
CTO, Trivium Systems. SimpleRM, he points out, has been developed
keeping in mind the specific needs of an SME. Amitabh adds
that there is no vertical focus in the positioning of SimpleRM
as it addresses SME needs horizontally. However, the companies
who have evinced interest for Trivium’s product in the
region belong to the verticals of manufacturing and telecom.
Trivium is also considering having a direct presence in Singapore
soon but prior to that, it wants to consolidate its indirect
channels. “Moving forward, we want to have more System
Integrators, resellers and alliances on the lines of Tecsol
in order to address the A-PAC market,” Saran adds. According
to him, competition in the market is not very organised and
most of the vendors in Singapore offer CRM solutions in components
rather than integrated offering such as SimpleRM. But do global
vendors such as Siebel and the likes, who now have offerings
for SMEs pose any competition to Trivium? “Not exactly.
The reason being, long implementation processes and lack of
empathy in understanding the needs of SMEs,” says Saran.
The market for CRM products in Singapore alone is pegged at
$48 million for the year 2002, with A-PAC on the whole expected
to touch $10 billion by 2003. The company aims to introduce
SimpleRM first, after which, other Trivium products would
also be introduced.
Sources close to the company state that gradually, Trivium
is aiming to synergise its various channels for offering SimpleRM
and might also look at taking an ASP route which is getting
acknowledged as a cost effective option by most of the SMEs.
“There are no immediate plans for taking an ASP route,
but it is an important channel,” says Amitabh. Asked
if the company would also look at marketing SimpleRM to large
enterprises in Singapore, he says that such accounts have
never appeared to be lucrative enough for the company and
the ‘product philosophy’ is centred on SMEs.
With around 45 developers in Bangalore, Trivium received its
first round of funding of $5 million from Intel and W R Hambarct
and is now looking at raising $12 million by the end of this
year.
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India
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