Written by Faiz Askari, Editor, Small Enterprise India.com

In today’s scenario, emails are considered to part of life. Businesses are running on emails. And in a study it is found that a typical entrepreneur usually spent more than three hours on checking emails. Having said this, a growing SME must have to look at email as an important component of their day to day business activity. Focusing only on offering specialized email solutions, Ajay Data, founder of Bharat Berry interacted exclusively with SmallEnterpriseIndia(dot)com and emphasized on the needs of advanced office communications. Through the set of features, we deliver performance, time saving, easy admin, and advanced communication and sharing features which are kind of ‘must have’ for the organizations.
 

Excerpts from the interview:

Office Communications play vital role in the business operations. What is the status of this form of communications among SMEs?
Role of emails, in today`s business scenario is very crucial and without email doing business is impossible. SMEs are using email as primary communication medium and have moved away from faxes and traditional postal mail to large extent. Email not only proves to be cost effective but also fast, easy and reliable.

Emails are increasingly accessed on multiple devices and are increasingly becoming more sensitive for successful business operations. What is your take on it?
Yes, access of email ‘anytime, anywhere’ is now possible helping everyone to remain connected to the offices/home and friends. Even if you are flying or enjoying on beach you are connected to your email systems, giving you sense of comfort of not missing something very important while you are away from office.

Please elaborate the USP of your email server? How is your product targets the SME environment?
XgenPlus email server software has now 11 years of experience built into it, addressing almost every day to day performance enhancing needs of everyone. Today just sending and receiving emails does not work for people, they need guaranteed delivery reports, secured access to their a/c keeping their data safe from competition/hackers, monitoring of logs of email traffic, group personalized email to send out new promotions or new year wishes, support center management through email, sending very large attachments (upto 1 GB), are some of the key elements which are required by organisations.

What are the key challenges that you usually face when you approach an entrepreneur and explains the utilities of an advanced email server for his organization?
Most frequent one is lack of awareness and branding about our solution, which is otherwise better than other competing products. Lots of people do not realise the threats they have around email in their organisation about leaking of data, wrong commitments on email, spying on management emails, misappropriate language to customers are some of them and when we show the features to manage them through XgenPlus, its an eye-opener for them.

According to you, among SMEs, what is the level of awareness and level of willingness to adopt better technologies?
It is considered to be low awareness but when we meet and demonstrate the capability of our email server, they feel left out and look for improving their business processes through our XgenPlus email server.

What is the cost of acquiring an email server from X Gen?
Email server may be acquired in multiple ways. First option is – ‘On Premise,’ second option is ‘Hosted’, and third option is ‘SaaS’ model. On Premise -- depending upon number of users and offices the solutions needs to be designed and costs accordingly. However for a 10 users organisation it will cost approx Rs. 5000/- a year in hosted model, where he gets all the power he needs in the organisation.

Managing the IT infrastructure is also a challenge among SMEs. What is your take on it?
Companies who do not want to take the burden of deploying IT infrastructure and managing it, we have two solutions for them.
1) Hosted solution in our Data Center
2) Software / Infra deployed in their premise and managed by us.
Depending upon the requirement SME can choose or we can help them to best solution available for them.

Which are segments that are active in your target business category and which are the promising segment for you?
Companies which are dependent on email in large extent for day to day business. However, we have call centers, hosting companies, companies with multiple offices, hospitals, jewelers, transport companies, education institutes, Govt departments and banks as our customer.

What expectation do you have from the SME market in next 12 to 18 months?

SME is the market for future and we see the biggest growth in that segment. We are already seeing growth in that market segment and number of inquiries increasing every week and hence we see that this number is increasing in next one year.