Consummate Communicator: Newgen Software Technologies
BEST SME-OVERALL/ SERVICES
TOTAL INCOME: Rs 101 Crore - 250 Crore
The odds against him were formidable when Diwakar Nigam set up Newgen Software Technologies in the early 1990s. Indian software services companies were beginning to make a mark, but Indian software product companies were unknown. The market was dominated by global heavyweights such as Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, IBM and others. "It was very tough initially," he says. "There was a lot of resistance from companies to our products."
But the odds have long been overcome. And today, Newgen has a customer base of over 450 at more than 1,000 installations in over 50 countries. Around 70 per cent of its revenues come from outside India, the US topping the list of foreign clients with 29 per cent, followed by West Asia at 28 per cent. It has development centres in Delhi, Noida and Chennai, employing over 1,500 people, plus fully owned subsidiaries in the US, Canada and Singapore.
KEY FACTS
- Newgen is into Intelligent Business Process Management (BPM), Enterprise Content Management (ECM), and Customer Communication Management (CCM).
- It has businesses across continents and its customers include the likes of Astra Zeneca, Caterpillar, Citibank, Coca-Cola, Dow Jones, Electronic Arts, Aadhar-UIDAI, Airtel, Bajaj Allianz, and Deutsche Bank.
- In February 2014, Newgen raised Rs 100 crore from IDG Ventures and private equity firm Ascent Capital for an undisclosed amount
- It recently launched a mobile medicare enrollment solution for Health Plan
Its products cover a wide range of industries - banking and finance, which contributes more than 50 per cent to its revenue, along with healthcare, telecom, BPO and shared services. With a compounded annual growth rate of 28 per cent in the last three years, it has earned revenues of Rs 241 crore in 2013/14, while net profit rose from Rs 6.8 crore in 2010/11 to Rs 42 crore in 2013/14.
Nigam is a first-generation entrepreneur, with a post graduate degree from IIT Madras, who spent two years at HCL before plunging into his first entrepreneurial venture in 1978. Newgen is his second effort. "We recognised early that the Internet would play a vital role in businesses and built our products around it," he says. Digitising paper documents was a major task in those early days and Newgen's first break came from Canon, which licensed its document processing software. The Japanese company, in turn, supplied this technology to CitiBank in India and, thereafter, there was no looking back for Newgen.
"We were looking for an ideal technology partner to support our rapid business expansion plans and Newgen matched our requirements perfectly," says V. Krishnan, Senior Vice President, IT, L&T Financial Services. "Its BPM solution helped us centralise our retail lending operations, cut operational costs and reduce process cycle time, which in turn, gave us the necessary operational agility to scale up and enter new markets."
With its sustained focus on innovation, Newgen invests a huge amount on research and development. It keeps enhancing and innovating its products to keep pace with industry developments, adding stronger capabilities to existing products and developing new ones in emerging technologies such as mobile and web applications.
