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Keeping up with technologies, changing product mix and continuously offering new products, value addition and technology increments has been the strategy for CDP India, says Nikesh Sakaria, Managing Director and CEO at CDP.
1. CDP was born in 1991, when IT services and especially ISP services barely had a market in India. How did you manage to grow in the initial years?
CDP, at its birth, stood for Computer Data Products. It started as a partnership company on July 1, 1991, and in 1999 we became a Private Limited company. This, in 2016, is our silver jubilee year.
Our basic business mantra has been- Constant Change. Over the last couple of decades, our business has only evolved with the times.
We started with a five-member team in a regulated market-environment when there were no IBMs or HPs. We assembled our own brand – Venus, and our biggest customers were the BFSI segment – the likes of Citibank and others. Although Citibank is still our customer, the solutions we have deployed with them have completely changed.
In our association with the BFSI segment in India, we were only PC suppliers at one point in time. But now we also deploy turnkey solutions, like the ICICI Tap banking project that we have executed in partnership with Lenovo. We now offer our own software which is meant for tap banking which allows a banking rep to open accounts at their customer’s doorstep. We are not only providing them the hardware but also the KYC software that is used during Tap-banking. We are constantly a step ahead of the industry here.
End of 1994-95, when IBM came to India with PCs and servers, we became their premium partner. With every market change CDP latched on and we were always a tech wave ahead.
2. CDP offers end to end solutions, with a number of technologies. What do you think is your strength in the market?
CDP always works on subject-matter expertise. When we say we are taking any product to the BFSI segment, it’s a new value added to them. I don’t know any other partner who offers an eKYC product. Most partners stick to hardware, and don’t get into software development. This is our expertise – we believe in a robust development cycle. We have an office in Bombay, and our warehouse is 6000 sq ft with state of the art equipment, where we proudly showcase working proof of concepts of our upcoming innovations.
We use technology to improve the customer experience. For instance, earlier BFSI would take would take 3-4 hours just to load customer photographs; it is now done in less than 5-minutes at our QC center. This is just one example.
When Lenovo develops a new enterprise-grade ThinkPad, there is hardly anything for a partner to do. But what we have done is to pre-load enterprise software and perform full functionality-tests that a customer needs. If a customer were to replicate this task, their engineers would spend at least three to four hours per PC, which is a time vs. money for them. Now, we are performing imaging at our QC center, through our dedicated servers.. For say 10,000 PCs, it’s a huge time and investment saved.
3. Tell us something about your award winning solutions 1MarketView and 1ConsoleView?
1 market view is a stock exchange based product, it is a market intelligence engine that assists you and advises on how to invest in the stock market and gives a complete analysis of the stock market and complete portfolio management. If you want alerts on the scrip, it will track how the scrip moves in the next 7-10 days. If customers wish to follow any particular scrip, they could assign parameters. The software sends alerts, and prompts which way the market is going, based on market announcements and news. Stockbrokers, and individual investors are our customers for 1 market view. We offer 2-3 variants of the software, starting from novice investors for whom we have simpler data views.
IConsoleView is an infrastructure and asset management tool.
1Cview is CRM product to help sales-organizations, that has some breakthrough features like geo-tagging facility, and provision for complete customer database views. .
4. Since when have you been associated with Lenovo?
Our association with Lenovo goes back to IBM days- when IBM had come in India, in 1994-95. When Lenovo took-over the ThinkPad business from IBM, we moved with them.
5. How has Lenovo been a beneficial partner for CDP?
CDP and Lenovo both are very customer-centric. We always find them in the same wavelength, and have mutually benefited. We have won some very large deals in the BFSI segments viz. HDFC. ICICI, Citibank.
6. CDP has utilised FTZs for growth. Can you elaborate how?
We have a unit in the free trade warehousing zone, so our customers can benefit from the lower excise duties. Earlier our customers used to import hardware directly from Singapore and Malaysia. We are now importing devices in advance and also stocking for them at the FTZ site. As a result the average lead time is reduced from 4 – 5 weeks to one week, not to mention lower inventory carrying costs.
The paperwork at FTZ is far easier and more economical, versus imports clearances. Almost 90% of all our FTZ stocks are Lenovo Servers, PCs, and Tablets. The advantage of doing business thru FTZ with Lenovo is that they can now they ship directly from their China plant to us. While other major OEMs ship to Singapore, that makes the customers’ costs as well as delivery times go up significantly.
7. Does CDP have a network of partner distributers as well? How do you keep them motivated?
We do have, but it’s mainly for services branches spread across country since our main customers, ICICI bank and HDFC bank have branches pan India. We have a national franchise partner. We do take advantage of the Lenovo partner network, but over and above that we have our own strong services network.
8. What are CDP’s focus areas for 2016, and is Lenovo a part of it?
Our new strategy revolves around gaining bigger acceptability round our eKYC solutions and building bigger inroads with our BFSI software solutions. Lenovo continues to be our topmost OEM Partner, and we plan to bundle eKYC with all the tablets we sell to banks.
Currently even bigger banks do not have a complete end to end solutions, and most customers have separate software vendors, hardware vendors and MDM solutions. If they were to approach us, we will offer them a complete bundle – hardware and software, along with maintenance. This is going to be our marquee offering for 2016.
