Knowlarity: Offering telephony applications for SMEs | SupportBiz

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Knowlarity: Offering telephony applications for SMEs

Telephony is an integrated arm of business communications. Considering the priorities of SMEs, a solution is needed which can address their specific needs.

Gurgaon-based Knowlarity was incepted in the year 2009 with  the view of serving SMEs. The company is said to  have pioneered  cloud telephony in India.

In an exclusive interaction with SupportBiz, Ambarish Gupta, CEO, Knowlarity, says, “We have an objective  of providing  affordable cloud-enabled solutions for small businesses to automate their office workflow. We are filling an important gap in the domain of intelligent telephony solutions that were not affordable for smaller businesses before.”

Edited excerpts:

What is the status of the adoption of cutting edge communication infrastructure solutions among SMEs?

SMEs in India are uniformly using telephones for their business communication. Though smartphones are getting good acceptability,  most SMEs are using it for voice calls more than data-based applications. This limits the richness of  business communication. 

There is an opportunity  to bring in  advanced business communication tools to help Indian small and mid-sized enterprises. These include CRM systems, ERP, help desk and marketing automation systems.

What is your opinion on offering better RoI to the SME customer?

Indian SMEs have limited working capital. This leads to SME  entrepreneurs  taking  a cash-conscious approach in every aspect of business. Cloud computing is a great innovation that allows  entrepreneurs to pay  according to consumption. This becomes extremely helpful  to SMEs. They  do not have to make huge   capital expenditure  investment in  the tools that they use for  business communication. Moreover, cloud computing allows the same infrastructure to be shared among multiple users, leading to lower cost per user. This improves return on investments (RoI) dramatically.

When RoI becomes very important, cloud computing can be a game changer. Knowlarity Cloud Telephony has  introduced  telephony applications in the market  that can be of great help to Indian SMEs. Our fax-to–e-mail service superFax costs less than a fax machine. Our hosted PBX service superReceptionist costs 20% of the cost of a typical PBX machine.

What are the key drivers of your business?

There is a need for business telephones to become intelligent, by including Interactive Voice Response systems, Text-To-Speech, and other technologies. We are able to provide these on a hosted platform and at  a cost that  is a fraction of  that for buying systems for dedicated use. This is what  has been driving the adoption of our products.

What is your go-to market strategy for capturing the SME market?

SMEs are a difficult market to get to. We are trying to get  into the market by providing very high-quality products at a very low cost and selling it over telephone. This has allowed us to reach out to a very large market, very quickly. Also, this has  helped us  build credibility in the market quickly.

What are the trends evolving in this market segment? 

People are now more comfortable with new technologies. When we started, we thought selling technology to SMEs was going to a be very difficult job. It started out as very difficult, but has become easier lately.

Indian businesses now understand the importance of technology in improving their competitiveness in the market and providing  that extra edge that is needed to clinch  deals. They are willing to understand that technology can provide them that extra edge.  This has helped us sell our products in the market.

What are the challenges SMEs are facing  in growing to the next level?

I think the biggest challenge is finding professional middle-level management in the company. Fortunately, we have a lot of world-class companies being built up here. Also, there are a lot of global companies that have  set up offices in India. This  provides SMEs the opportunity  to efficiently train  the necessary talent pool, creating a wider group of mid-level managers.