Bengaluru trip: buzz, business, and… a lot of traffic
Last week I was very privileged to spend time in Bengaluru (India) with Sunando Banerjee, our Channel Business Manager for APAC&ME, Francesc Comas, our Head of the Services practice, and part of the Openbravo team that is working out of Bangalore for an extended period of time.
There really is nothing new under the sun when I refer in my title to the continuous positive buzz, great business dynamics, and umm the… traffic. Yet once more confirming those feelings that many other travellers before me have had as well, just further strengthens the feelings many of us share when we think about the business opportunities that exist in Bengaluru, and India in general.
With the new government having come to power recently we can also already feel the tremendously positive impulse of dynamism, and I would almost say, entrepreneurial spirit making inroads in the country’s public sector that can become a very powerful driving force for further economic growth. This feeling is only just strengthened through public statements by globally recognized entrepreneurs like Jack Ma who are actively seeking to develop business in India. Many challenges are ahead that’s for sure (Yep, to come back to my point on the traffic … infrastructure is obviously one of those challenges), but there is a lot of positive energy, optimism and confidence, and I can assure you that for those of us with their home base in Europe traveling to India this spirit gives a lot of positive energy. Much needed in the (at best) flat economic situation in most European countries.
Also in the Openbravo ecosystem we are seeing continued, and accelerated, advances. We had very positive work sessions with Promantia, our official localizer for India with whom we are working closely to deliver great results to several of our clients. And, already in one of my earlier posts I referred to the growing interest from resellers and software integrators that to date solely worked with legacy players to now also become an official Openbravo Partner. During this trip we once again met with several of those potential Partners and the outlook to further expand and strengthen our Partner network is really very good. This is great news for all those businesses and institutions thinking about adopting the Openbravo Commerce or ERP Platform solutions.
Today we are already working closely with domain experts like Siva Devirredy who is, besides being a modest and very friendly person, highly regarded in the ERP space in general and India in particular. Siva changed his highly successful Accenture career for an absolutely fantastic initiative called GoCoop. The team at GoCoop has built a social marketplace for handloom weaving and handicrafts. By bringing together buyers (both professional buyers and consumers through their ecommerce platform) and sellers the parties collaborate directly, therewith optimizing the value chain. This allows co-operatives of small handicraft producers to strongly grow their market reach through a professional platform, accelerating their sales growth and improving their margins which is something extremely valuable as many of those small producers work under very challenging circumstances. GoCoop’s marketplace is integrated with Openbravo to be able to offer cross-channel retail capabilities and end-to-end supply chain management to the co-operatives on mobile devices. We believe GoCoop and Openbravo could strongly enable co-operative producers in India and across the globe in the years to come. That’s what I would call relevant innovation with high positive social impact. Congratulations to Siva and his team and thank you so much for working with Openbravo.
