Openbravo Vying for a leadership presence in modern Indian retail space

Marco De Vries, Chief Executive Officer, Openbravo, speaks with VARINDIA giving details about Openbravo Commerce platform while also talking at length about the Indian retail industry  and the evolution of Modern Retail business

Could you give us a brief on Openbravo and about your Commerce platform? 

Openbravo is the provider of the Openbravo Commerce Platform, which is the Commerce platform preferred by agile retailers. Openbravo offers an unmatchable combination of a state-of-the-art commerce solution developed on top of a flexible and easily extendible development platform, mobile, web and cloud-ready with broad horizontal ERP functionality embedded, including Merchandise Management, Supply Chain Management, Multichannel Management and Enterprise Management.

For any other industry Openbravo provides the Openbravo ERP Platform, built on top of the same development platform and providing a comprehensive out-of-the-box functionality in key areas like Sales Management, Procurement Management, Projects Management, Manufacturing and MRP Management, Warehouse Management and Financials Management.

Talking about the Indian retail industry, what kind of a market do you enjoy here?

India has been a key market for us since several years, which is the reason why we have built up local presence. Our presence in India started in 2008 and since then we have increased our local team to effectively serve our local partners and customers. We are proud today to count with over 100 customers in India in different industries and 12 partners. For the coming quarters we have planned for an ambitious channel growth by increasing the number of partners in the country. In this effort we focus primarily on attracting companies with demonstrated experience in the ERP market in general and in the Retail industry. Those companies generally are already distributors of other legacy solutions yet feel the market pressure that pushes them to further improve their offering by adding innovative open source solutions like Openbravo to their product and services portfolio.

If we think about the state of the Indian retail industry, we must always understand its reality today and especially with regards the role of organized retail, which drives growth and innovation in the industry. Organized retail penetration varies significantly in different retail subsectors, but in general we can say that industry maturity is low with a still low technology adoption in key business areas. Today’s state results in important business challenges retailers face. For example they face important technology challenges in terms of the availability and quality of customer, product and inventory information across channels. Promising is that the current state seems to be better in specialty hardgoods and softgoods retailers which use to be early technology adopters followed by department stores that also plan to increase their IT investments. 

Beyond India, more on a global level, we see the remainder of 2014 with great optimism and we expect an important growth globally in terms of partners and new customers.  Year to date numbers confirm that we are doing well so I’m confident we will achieve our goals here and globally.

How has modern retail business requirements changed with time? How do you with your solutions help businesses cope with these challenges?

Without a doubt the main change the retail industry is facing is the rise of a new type of consumer. Empowered consumers armed with multiple devices are disrupting purchasing dynamics and exercising more control on brand success. Buying behavior has dramatically changed and today the store is no more the final or only stage in their buying journey. Consumers search online, ask for opinions in social media, go to the store to experience the product and more often return online to make the final purchase. Consumers demand much better service and more personalized communications and offerings, and expect a seamless shopping experience across all channels.

As a result retailers must constantly reinvent themselves to systematically understand and serve increasingly powerful consumers and must invest in engaging customer interaction. In this age of the customer, the only sustainable competitive advantage is knowledge of and engagement with customers. Having said this, the cross-channel phenomenon is here and will stay with e-commerce and m-commerce growing very fast. Mobile technologies are a key enabler for better operations and are gaining ground rapidly. And very important, even with the threat of online channels, the physical store remains the most important touch point as our recently released study has revealed.

As a result many retailers are now struggling to adapt to this new reality and this is the reason why the agenda of most retail CIOs today includes the key task of selecting the right platform for the future.

How has modern technologies help retail industry evolve and improve operations?

Technology for retailers is today a growth driver. In today’s highly competitive landscape it enables them to optimize operations and to develop competitive advantages that allow seeking for new growth opportunities. New key technologies are flourishing constantly so retailers need to be always updated about their benefits and know how they can leverage them. 

The most demanding business areas from a technological perspective are sales and marketing, operations or even financials. Although there are some differences between the different retailer groups, in general we see a clear priority in the adoption of new store systems, new business intelligence tools fully embedded in their core systems and a progressive integration of the online channel. Here clearly mobility is one of these key technologies and it is rapidly gaining ground. Retailers invest in mobility mainly to enhance the customer’s experience and to improve business efficiency. 

Could you also throw some light on the recent research that Openbravo has conducted?

The study reveals the main IT systems priorities for retailers today. The starting point however deserves special attention since it is the confirmation of a key reality, which is the importance of the physical stores, despite the much talked a bout rapid growth of online retail. The study confirms that in retail physical stores will continue to be the main driver of sales in the coming years and this has an enormous influence over the retailers’ IT decisions. In India for example the study revealed that 98% of total retail sales will still be generated in traditional physical stores by the year 2018. 

The second main conclusion is a positive trend change in regards to IT investment. Retailers in leading markets plan to increase their IT budgets both at the corporate and stores level. We expect this trend to be observed in many other markets as well. If the trend is confirmed this shall be a very positive signal of economic recovery after several years of economic slowdown.

Our reaction in front of these conclusions can’t be more positive especially thinking on the confirmation of the continued importance of physical stores. The fact that this reality is even more apparent in markets like India also allows us to see the future with much optimism since India is one of our target geographies. 

Who are your customers in India? 

In India we are proud today to count with over 100 customers in different industries including leading companies like Federal Bank, Hisar Metals, Quick Heal and Esmech. In addition there are nowadays some important projects on-going that will go-live in the coming months in the APAC region. These projects include new customers such as a large hard goods retailer in Indonesia to implement Openbravo Commerce Platform in more than 250 stores or two sporting goods retailers in Hong Kong and India that are migrating to the Openbravo Commerce Platform from our previous POS solution.

Globally the Openbravo Commerce Platform has been successfully adopted by retailers from different sizes, in different subsectors and in different deployment scenarios. It is precisely its functional and technical flexibility that allows Openbravo to be adopted as a stand alone solution to support the whole retail business, to act only as the e-commerce backend for online orders processing and integrated with the existing E-Commerce platform or to be deployed as the new store solution integrated seamlessly with the retailer’s legacy ERP, where we are experiencing for example very strong interest among SAP customers, some of them already customers using the Openbravo store solution integrated in the back end with SAP. We have success cases under all these scenarios. 

What is your partner eco-system like?

Demand for the Openbravo solutions is growing rapidly across the Asia Pacific and Middle East region. To support this growing need, it is important for us to continuously strengthen the Partner Eco-System of the region, which nowadays is still very much India specific. Today it is heartening to see that the Indian Partners are getting matured and also helping the partners from other countries in the region, hence the eco-system every day is getting a bit stronger. 

In the Industry, the nature of IT procurement is changing rapidly and the latest trend is favoring Openbravo. Today the partner Eco-system is very well balanced with large to mid-size software organizations with ERP exposure partnering with Openbravo. Apart from India, the partner concentration is also increasing in Indonesia, Malaysia, Saudi Arab, Australia and China. We are also putting in place more and more localized consulting and support mechanism to support our partners and maintain this growth.