Spotlight

Moving Up quick and steady

From its incorporation, Newgen chose to be a company with a difference selling products at a time when other Indian IT majors were focusing upon selling their IT skills and services. By Tanu Talwar

Newgen Software Technologies Ltd, a leading player in the business process management and document management space is known for tailor made software solutions across industry verticals. Established in 1992, the company is committed towards offering the best possible products and solutions in terms of quality and aims to fulfil customer demand by exceeding requirements. Founded by Diwakar Nigam, the company was co-founded by his colleague T. S. Varadarajan, who worked with Nigam in Softtek Ltd.

Headquartered in New Delhi, the company has established a direct presence in 25 countries through sales and marketing offices and addresses about 40 countries through a network of partners and system integrators. With four research and development centres, three in New Delhi and one in Chennai, the company’s R&D team consists of over 300 members, who enhance its products and services and add to its existing portfolio. Diwarkar Nigam, Managing Director, Newgen Software Technologies Ltd, says, “The R&D group holds immense importance for us. It churns out a multitude of components catering to the entire range of image processing requirements right from displaying and creating images, to operations such as scanning and printing.” Besides developing imaging libraries, the group has numerous other credits to its worth. From among numerous attainments, one of the major achievements of the group has been the development of Newgen Micro PDF, which compresses PDF files to a remarkably small size.

Facing challenges head on

Newgen chose to be a company with a difference from day one. The company opted to sell products at a time when other major Indian IT companies were focusing upon selling their IT skills and services. Recalling the early days, Nigam states, “The Indian IT market was not very mature when we started out. Computers were just coming into the picture. Therefore, during the start up phase, one of the key challenges encountered by us was the lack of awareness in the Indian market about the products that we had to offer.” Consequently there were not many takers for the products that the company put forward. This required Newgen to not only spread the cause and benefits of document and business management but also spell out what its products and services meant. “To gain customers it was imperative to make them understand the advantages of systematic business and document management. In India, most people did not know about DMS and Imaging. So, the first challenge was to educate the market about these products”, explains Nigam.

Abroad, the company faced bigger hurdles, as it met fierce competition from large competitors like Filenet and Tibco as well as a host of smaller players who were already active in the market. “Entering the advanced markets proved to be difficult for us, as many of our competitors had already established a strong presence in these countries”, adds Nigam. However, the company’s consistent focus on offering high quality products and services that went beyond implementation, at acceptable price points to multinational corporations in developing markets, and replicating these successes in developed markets helped it overcome these challenges and made it a partner of choice for leading companies worldwide.

Bagging Customers

After starting out with just one client at the time of its incorporation the company has bagged over 700 customers from across the globe. With a client list that includes prominent industry names such as HSBC Bank, Deutsche Bank, ABN Amro Bank, ICICI Bank, State Bank Of India, ING Vysya Bank, Bank of Tanzania, Bahrain Monetary Agency, Ranbaxy, Kuwait Finance House, Max New York Life, Bajaj Allianz, Philips, GE Countrywide, EXL, Satyam Nipuna, iGATE and Kenyan Airways among others, the company has clearly capitalised on each and every vertical present. This has been achieved by understanding the functioning and unique requirements of customers operating across various verticals.

Furthermore, the company’s dedication to continuously enhance and expand its product portfolio has not only helped it rope new customers but has also assisted it maintain the original ones. Its dedication to its clients can be judged from its continued association with its first client, a global imaging giant from Japan. “Our first client was a fortune global 500 imaging giant from Japan. The company is one of the leading producers of multi functional devices, cameras, projectors and several other optical products. Till today we are trusted with a lot of their IT development work and an entire group is specifically dedicated towards serving the client.”

Products and services

Talking about its portfolio of offerings, Nigam says, “Currently we offer a huge array of products and services. Our enterprise solution framework is founded on our flagship engines of OmniDocs and OmniFlow.” While OmniDocs, is an enterprise document management system, which manages document archival and retrieval. OmniFlow is an enterprise workflow/business process management engine that consists of a process modeller, execution engine, business rules engine and tools for process monitoring and measurement. The solution enables rule based routing of work items with capabilities for raising exceptions, escalations with a complete audit trail for the process flow. It can further integrate with various work item initiation tools like OmniScan, OmniExtract, forms connectors to any third party capture applications.

On the server side, it can integrate with legacy applications like ERP, SCM and CRM applications as well as with messaging systems like MQ Series. One of the most important and unique features of the solution is a rapid WorkDesk builder that helps in creating customised human interfaces based on the role and authorisations for users. The system can also be connected to any report generation software thus making it an end-to-end solution. Besides these products the company offers a host of other solutions like OmniCompliance and OmniReports that are completely flexible and interoperable systems, working in-sync with any given open architecture.

Furthermore, the company provides services for packaged and enterprise software product companies. These services cover the entire range product life cycle and encompass the various stages of product development, starting from its conceptualisation, maintenance, support, enhancement and migration to testing and quality assurance. It’s this flexibility and assurance that that makes Newgen’s offerings an instant hit with every industry vertical. Catering to the BFSI, Telecom, e-governance, BPO, shared services, healthcare and manufacturing among others, the company earned total revenue of Rs 48 crore in 2005-06, whereby the maximum revenue was generated by the BFSI sector.

Broadening its network

For Nigam, India holds tremendous potential vis-à-vis business process management and document management products and services Quoting a Gartner report, Nigam states that, after 2010, sufficient experience with BPM technology will become a competitive necessity to achieve innovative benefits that result in part from greater process visibility. Companies that adopt BPM before 2009 will continue to enjoy the advantages of superior efficiency and operational visibility until at least 2012. By 2012, most companies will be BPM-proficient and well on the path to continuous process improvement.

With more than 60 percent of its clients coming from India, the country holds an extremely important position for Newgen. “Not only does India represent over half of our market, but it’s also the breeding ground for our successful product launches, which after success in India, capture international markets,” asserts Nigam. As Indian companies go global, Nigam expects the demand for BPM solutions from these companies to shoot up exponentially. In order to capitalise on booming demand, the company is all set to expand its reach. Currently present in 25 countries Newgen plans to expand its network across 100 countries by 2010. “We are aggressively targeting regions such as the Middle East, Africa and Europe, as these countries hold tremendous potential for growth,” states Nigam. Besides, growing globally the company is also looking at extending its home network. He adds, “Though we are already present in various Indian cities such as New Delhi, Chennai, Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Kolkata, we plan to further increase our presence in other cities in the near future.”