30 Minute Interview

SaaS in action

Prasad Rajappan, Founder and Managing Director, Cnergyis, spoke to Nivedan Prakash about the company’s SaaS + Service model and its operations in India.

Prasad Rajappan

Cnergyis’ Indian operations

We are into HR-Payroll-Compliance-Income Tax services and solutions. We currently process about 1.4 lakh employee records in India. Our entire HR suite is based on the SaaS (Software-as-a-Service)+ Service model, wherein the customer gets the entire suite. Our HR suite includes online recruitment, training, appraisal, leave, payroll and compliance. Our target for the next three to four years is to reach five million employee records. With offices already in six cities, we intend to cover 40 locations directly and through partners.

Industry verticals

Over the past eight years, Cnergyis has worked for various industry verticals like BFSI, Retail, IT and Pharma, and SMBs, evolving practical solutions right from e-Recruitment, leave management, reimbursements, income tax, online attendance, ePayslips, Web-based payroll, statutory compliance, MIS, performance appraisal, cost centre accounting and many other features. Our customer base is of 25,000 to 30,000.

Unique selling proposition (USP)

Our USP is a combination of HR-Payroll and statutory processes delivered through a SaaS + Service model. The flexible options of ‘Insource-CoSource-Outsource’ have opened up tremendous opportunities and are receiving a positive response from the industry. We have learnt the best practices by learning various industry verticals. In the market, currently none of the players is giving the product as well as the service.

Currently, we want to focus and be leader in HR and its related areas.

Go-to-market strategy

We mainly target CEOs, wherein we sell them on the advantages of best practices. Secondly, we target governance as HR governance today has become a key area and as such India does not have any HR governance platforms and even the standards are not well set. Besides, we are targeting small players of payroll who are using Excel to process salaries. We are offering them our SaaS + Service model as a platform.

SaaS adoption in India

It is mainly because SaaS is a technology, wherein the companies mainly want to focus on the core business rather than spending time setting up HR and Payroll processes.

Earlier this model was not available, so the companies had to either buy the product or outsource. In addition, while outsourcing also, they were uncomfortable about giving the data outside. With the coming of the SaaS model, it has given an opportunity to these companies to outsource the product and at the same time have control over the data. Besides, there is no CAPEX, no investments; no need to train people and the deployment becomes faster.

Outsourcing vs. in-house processing

There are a couple of reasons that companies would outsource their HR-Payroll processes. First is the investment on technology and the other reason being confidentiality. Today, the attrition level of the people who manage the HR processes is so high that the companies fear that the vital information may leak out. That is the reason why the companies outsource these operations to companies such as Cnergyis.

In HR outsourcing, companies do not have to worry about the mundane operations of calculating salaries and other related processes. With the HR outsourcing, companies are able to do analytics in a much better way, wherein they can look at the performance of their employees. Moreover, it is because of technology and SaaS model, companies are not directly involved in HR operations.

An ISV’s role

There is a great opportunity for a company like Cnergyis to take on large software providers in this competitive market. The competition level has changed dramatically, wherein any SaaS player can compete with the existing giant also.

Plans for tomorrow

We are trying to make the salary processing service simpler and non-glamorous. Our drive is to make payroll an easily available service in the commodity industry.

We are also looking for some strategic alliances overseas, wherein we can become India part of the story. We will also forge large strategic alliances and acquisitions abroad.