MECOMS delivers solutions for smart utilities, to be ready for the future.
It is a robust and flexible solution, designed to cope with the ever-changing
utility market landscape in India and globally
What is your product offering for the Indian market space?
Ferranti has a deep vertical offering for the energy and utilities market,
including gas, water and thermal distribution. The company's MECOMS offers a
complete solution for utilities. It facilitates customer care and billing, meter
data management and operations.
Which are the customer verticals that you are currently tapping worldwide?
Ferranti serves the energy, gas and water markets and also a specific segment
like thermal distribution. Ferranti has a firm focus on the utilities market.
MECOMS has already been included in papers from renowned analysts, such as
Gartner and IDC. It delivers solutions for smart utilities, to be ready for the
future. This is why we summarize it as 'Empowering Smart Utilities'. MECOMS is a
robust and flexible solution, designed to cope with the ever-changing utility
market landscape in India and globally. We strongly believe that the utility
market will see a tremendous change in the coming years.
What are the solutions for performance management, and how do you have a
competitive edge?
Automating processes in a utility is only one step to become more efficient.
Utilities need to evolve with highly customer-focused organizations. This
becomes vital as markets get de-regulated. Setting target performance and
objectives is the key to drive continuous improvements. Continuous improvement
is essential in any total quality management or lean project and is the basis
for becoming more efficient. MECOMS uses the Microsoft BI strategy and is built
on its framework that is included with the well-known Dynamics AX platform.
MECOMS' business solution uses the concept of role-based business
productivity. The mantra is 'software designed for your people'. It does not use
a transaction type of user interface approach. Instead it puts a lot of emphasis
on the user-friendliness of the solution. The starting point is the company. It
has people who take up roles. Each role is responsible for certain business
processes. Each process is consists of several tasks. Talking about functions is
one thing, process and process performance to deliver people-ready business
solutions is another thing. This is something that differentiates a good system
and a great system.
What are the sectors that Ferranti is eyeing in India?
Energy, gas, water and thermal are all commodities that are addressed by
MECOMS. It is also designed to support multiple commodities in a single company.
Furthermore, energy, gas and water demand is on the rise. We see possibilities
in all these fields. We have invested considerably to ensure MECOMS meet the
Indian market requirements.
Although the European Union has unified legislation for electricity and gas
market liberalization, the practical implementations differ from country to
country. You need a robust and flexible solution to support this. The task of
converting this into smart processes is complex. No wonder that flexibility and
robustness are the key design criterion for the product. The only constant for
utilities is change. Think global, act local and then ensure that the local
market requirements and strategic directions are covered. Smart utilities should
make sure that they are prepared for the ride.
Ferranti has a global partnership with Microsoft, do you see this as an added
advantage especially for government sector and large organizations?
Our relation with Microsoft is extremely important to us. We work closely
with this software power house. Microsoft's footprint with Microsoft office
portfolios is huge. MECOMS interface builds upon their usability. People who
know Microsoft office tools quickly find their way in MECOMS. Microsoft has
defined SERA, a smart energy reference architecture for the utility market.
MECOMS complies with this reference architecture.
Microsoft offers a complete technology stack from operating systems to
databases, application servers, mobile clients, and more. It makes the IT
management easier and lowers the TCO and therefore increases the RoI. The
Microsoft partnership gives us the comfort that we can invest in these areas
where we can make the differenc, the deep vertical application knowledge for the
utilities. We don't need to worry about technology, we can trust on Microsoft
for a solid and scalable stack.
Microsoft is a partner-driven organization. This gives us the benefit to we
work with other partners for implementation and support. More than 95 percent of
the Microsoft business is sold through this partner channel. More than 400,000
partners are registered in the Microsoft partner program. More than 10,000 of
them are gold certified. This is quite something in terms of capability
building. The reach of the Microsoft sales and marketing machinery is also
important.
Would you look at taking the channels route in your go-to-market strategy or
would you go direct?
Partners are essential in our go-to-market strategy. We identify reselling
and implementation partners in our partner program. In Europe partnerships are
already in place with organization such as Logica, Colombus IT, Euriware and
Areva. We want to develop the same model in India.
Indian is an IT hot spot. We also look at the Indian IT solution powerhouses
to take the MECOMS application into the Indian as well as the International
market. The utilities market and MECOMS implementation requires extensive
knowledge of processes and best practices. Ferranti offers implementation
support services for partners to grow their capabilities.
Do you plan to rope in SPs for deployments? What is your strategy for a wider
market reach?
We are encouraged by the positive feedback from several Indian SIs. They like
the product, the vision, the strategy and the mapping on the Indian context.
Actually this convinced us to invest in our Gurgaon Cybercity office.
The success of MECOMS depends on the capability building in the local market.
It requires teams to implement, manage and support the solution. This only works
if adequate implementation capability is available. SIs with their international
experience can take us to other geographies. Therefore, building knowledge will
be an essential task of the India office.
What are your expansion plans and strategic tie-ups for India operations?
What is is your marketshare and revenue targets for FY 2010-11?
Ferranti India is in start-up mode. For 2010 we are looking to win projects
with high reference ability to build confidence. In the next fiscal we will
continue to build alliances with major Indian partners. We will focus on
capacity building and evangelism. For now, this is more important to us than
marketshare or revenue targets. We will build and grow slowly and steadily.
Muntazir Abbas
muntazira@cybermedia.co.in