Raghunathan Perumal, CEO of Agile labs, pioneers of packaged applications, talks candidly to Jayant Mishra about his focus, e-governance and the Axpert product which is currently waiting for its patent to be granted.
Perumal who takes obvious pride in talking about his award-winning product Pro-Fit, told us what made Agile labs take things a stage further, resulting in the development of Axpert.
'Axpert is not an application it’s a frame work” said Perumal. We wanted to do something 'out of the box' that’s when Sabarish, our CTO, zeroed in on the fact that most project failures in IT were due to communication. Based on this discovery we developed Axpert, a frame work that would make IT really simple.'
This particular product enables the user to build any enterprise application (CRM,ERP,SCM,ETC) without writing a single line of code. Not only eliminating the need for a programmer but making corrections easy, as there is no code to fix.
During an e-governance conference, Perumal heard a NIC director saying “We want a horse and ask IT to give us one - IT gives us a donkey and then tries to make us believe it’s a horse”. The quote sounded amusing to Perumal as he was aware of the fact that 60-70 percent of implementations are failures because of communication and he had the solution.
Such failures are bound to happen, and a communication gap is inevitable. Giving the example of a typewriter Perumal explains: “Years ago, when getting a draft typed, people were dependent on their typist. They would call the typist and explain what they want, the typist who is an expert in typing and not in telepathy makes few errors in decoding and made few mistakes.
'Word processing on computers made it easy for everyone to create their own drafts. Not only did it result in accurate transcription, but also correcting mistakes was made easy, by the simple use of the backspace key.
'Axpert is based on a similar idea which enables people to do things the way they want. Business users can give us their requirements, which would go to our business analysts and they deliver the result, avoiding the need for a developer team.'
Perumal's vision is eventually to make business analysts a thing of the past, in the same way Agile eliminated the requirement of the developer team with their technology.
The company currently has two main products. 5th gear is an ECS (enterprise collaboration system), which can be implemented within ten working days, it costs Rs 0.99 million, including the implementation and comes with a 20 user licence. Axpert costs Rs 100,000 and is currently used by IKYA, Uniworld, J.B Boda and Sutures.
Agile is a partner-driven company, Mike Shah, Ex-Digital CEO and his group are its main support in terms of customer acquisition and finance. The company has partners in Thailand and South Africa and expects to have them in Europe soon. The company has a headcount of 40.
Perumal applied to get Axpert patented 3-4 years back and is still waiting.
“The patent is still pending and is in its cooling period. I wish the time taken for patenting was reduced, we are in a digital age and 3-4 years is too much” said Perumal. X |