SMB Stack

Pradeep and I were together at Larsen & Toubro from 1995 to 2001. Pradeep was in-charge of cement sales for Gujarat (a major industrial state in Western India) while I was rolling out SAP at L&T Gujarat. We completed the SAP rollout in 01 and I moved onto join Satyam. Pradeep continued in L&T till 2003 until L&T hived off the cement business to to "Birla Group" (now Ultratech Cement). At that point Pradeep started his on small business trading in cement. He, gradually, added steel , ready mix concrete, cement and clinker export and expanded his business to whole of western India. Today Pradeep runs a Rs 400 crore ($ 20 Million) business all built from scratch in a matter of six years. Of course , the construction boom in India, helped Pradeep a lot in addition to his extensive experice in Infrastructure products.

I got a call from Pradeep three weeks back while he was visiting his daughter at the East Coast. After exchanging greetings and our stories, we settled down for a long telecon. He wanted to put in IT systems to run his business but was little skeptic of cost and ROI given the current economic situation and pull back on real estate / development projects.

As a "die hard" SAP fan , my first and quick solution was to implement "SAP Business One". It didn't take me much to unerstand Pradeep was well aware of new SAP solutions for the SMB segment. However , he felt business and market situation was not ripe enough to get into implementation of a complex integrated systems. He wanted to start with something simple , easy and quick and may be build in baby steps as the situation improves.

I asked him to give me some time for research and hook up next week.

Over last two weeks , I had number of calls with him and together we explored numersous solutions. I gave him a demo of Google Apps , showed him heap CRM. Personally I explored Sugar CRM and how Sugar could be chaeply hosted in Amazon cloud. While we are still in discovery phase , two things came to me which I feel worth a mention here:

1. Theere are number of free open source (or very cheap subscription based) business solutions out there for small businesses. These solutions are there, practically, for every industry.
2. These solutions are good from short term standpoint but long term TOC will be very high coz there is no 'off the shelf' interagtion available.

I guess we all understand both these points, but realizing them first hand gave me a totally different perspective. It also suggested that open source movement needs to be channelized now in the sense there is hardly any value in building a new CRM solution. But integrating existing CRM solutions eg Sugar with other open solutions can be immense business value . For example CRM solutions can be integrated with Google Check Out . HR solutions can be integrated with Linked in .. and so on . Another key area is to put together the methodology and buisiness processes to make these systems easier from deployment standpoint.

I thought the first step is to create a directory of open source solutions and put the information in one place. With this at the back of my mind, I stared working on smbstack where I want to stack good open source business solutions to create a base refrence location.. Hopefully it will grow into something more interesting and of value to to small busienss owners.

Please write to me if you want to contribute or have suggestions ...