While Indian enterprises were on a steady pace toward cloud adoption over the last decade, Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the demand for cloud technologies to ensure smooth business resilience and growth. As data and analytics company GlobalData sees a surge in cloud demand that has resulted in cloud-based offerings outshining traditional products. In a recent conversation with CXOToday, Diwakar Nigam, Managing Director, Newgen Software, explains how cloud innovation can improve business resilience. He also discusses the company’s new digital offerings, business strategies and roadmap for the next one year.
CXOToday: What role did cloud play in boosting your financial performance in FY20?
Diwakar Nigam: Our consolidated revenue from operations was up by6.5% year-on-year (YoY) at Rs 660.8 crores in FY20, as compared to Rs 620.6 crores in FY19. Revenue from our annuity streams (ATS/AMC, support, and cloud/SaaS) stood at Rs 368.6 crores. Of this, the revenue from our cloud offering was at Rs 38.3 crores, witnessing a 60% y-o-y growth. We believe that our annuity revenue streams from existing customers would help us maintain stability in revenues. Furthermore, our concerted efforts towards more efficient operations and cost optimization would help us maintain a healthy liquidity position.
CXOToday: What are your key geographies and verticals? Did you launch any new product in recent months?
Diwakar Nigam: Apart from India, APAC, Africa, and Middle East, we continue to focus on the US, Europe, and Australian markets.During the year, we witnessed growth across the board in our key geographies. India, however, continued to face challenges on account of consolidation in the banking sector and sluggish economic growth.
Financial services continued to be our strongest vertical, contributing to 57% of the total revenues during the last fiscal. This was followed by healthcare at 9%, government and PSU at8%, BPO and IT at 8%, and insurance at 6%. Cloud and SaaS deployments saw a rapid increase across all geographies.
We launched a new and enhanced version of our intelligent process automation product -OmniFlowiBPS, with low code and cloud development and deployment capabilities. We also launched an updated version of our omnichannel customer engagement (CCM) product suite that enables users to easily create, design, and manage HTML email communications.
CXOToday: What are your key focus areas in the next one year?
Diwakar Nigam: Our primary focus is to help enterprises implement their digital transformation journeys. Organizations are expediting their digital initiatives, to improve their customer experiences and reduce costs. We are leveraging digital connectivity while ensuring data security to successfully execute and expedite project deployments and sales discussions. We are building local teams across mature markets and are focusing on strengthening our worldwide network of global system integrator partners. Going forward, we are prioritizing SaaS-based delivery models. We also continue to focus on research and development (R&D) with 8-10% of our revenue spent on the same.
CXOToday: What measures have you taken for your customers with regard to the pandemic?
Diwakar Nigam: Customers have always been our top priority at Newgen. We have enabled business continuity for our customers through past health crises like Ebola as well, and our efficiency to handle critical situations has only become stronger with time. We nurture a trusting and collaborative relationship with our customers. As a result, they too, have demonstrated flexibility in the face of unprecedented situations.
During the current pandemic, Newgen is enabling financial institutions across the globe with its geography-specific lending solutions to help them process loans to small businesses affected by the pandemic.
Our digital automation platform is helping our customers run their businesses remotely and securely without impacting the speed and quality of their services. We are enabling our customers to seamlessly collaborate and manage business processes from distributed locations and bridge silos by automating their processes, content, and communication.
Additionally, we have our work schedules matching withour customers’ time zones in order to provide seamless delivery and service at all times.
CXOToday: Do you have a contingency plan in place to deal with the current crisis?
Diwakar Nigam: We have a well-defined business continuity plan for ensuring uninterrupted enterprise-level services in the event of a crisis. The plan defines different types of potential interruptions and outlinesthe respective response mechanisms. Newgen’s distributed delivery infrastructure enables remote and continued services. We conduct an annual disaster recovery test to validate our preparedness, with the last successful test conducted in the previous quarter.
The fact that Newgen was already a digital organization allowed us and our customers to shift to a remote environment without affecting the flow of services. Our pre-emptive measures, business continuity processes, and robust IT infrastructure allowed us to effectively respond to the situation and seamlessly transition over 90% of our workforce to a remote working environment.
CXOToday: What is your message to partners and customers in the current situation?
Diwakar Nigam: Our digital automation offerings, in-depth industry knowhow, and well-defined business continuity plan have helped us in handling the current pandemic. Our customers globally have been able to maintain uninterrupted operations, using our digital automation platform. We are taking all the required measures to ensure safety for our employees and stakeholders. We are also strategizing our cloud offerings to improve business resilience for our clients.