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CHANDRAN SANKARAN
FOUNDER, ZYME SOLUTIONS
Systemizing
Sales
For the likes of Dell and SanDisk to sell their
products, there are over 6,000 distributors and a million retailers around
the world. It’s a very fragmented distribution system and it means that
technology companies have a hard time figuring out how much they sell,
which products sell more, which less, and in which regions the sales
happen. The data is also voluminous, and becoming increasingly so, making
it difficult for internal IT systems to cope with it.
In 2003, Chandran Sankaran had sold a company he
had previously founded and was looking around for something else to do. He
spoke to some of the customers he previously had and soon saw the
distribution problem that companies were struggling with. “Some of them
told me that it was even difficult to retain people who worked on
collecting and organizing the retail data because it was so chaotic,” he
says.
Sankaran visualized a solution where he would
establish a data centre to which retailers could upload their sales data,
and manufacturers could then access the same. In IT parlance, it’s called a
cloud solution, where the same infrastructure and solutions are offered to
a number of customers, thus bringing down IT costs substantially for each
customer.
With that idea in mind, he approached a global tech
company (Sankaran declines to name it) and said he would take their entire
distribution tracking exercise off their hands.
The company agreed — may be they were impressed by
Sankaran’s successful track record till then. That go-ahead was the trigger
Sankaran was looking for, and in 2004, he formed Zyme. Zyme’s cloud
solution, which we described earlier, is not as simple as it sounds. A
small Vietnamese retailer may send the data in a form that the regular
English-focused computer systems may not recognize. A Japanese retailer may
do it in a still different form. Different regions may describe the same
product details differently. Sankaran’s IT team in Bangalore created
automated solutions that would clean up all such differences, and offer a
uniform view to manufacturers. On occasions when the automated system does
not work, a manual system comes in.
Today, many of the world’s biggest IT brands are
Zyme customers. That includes Logitech, Symantec, Seagate, Dell, Xerox,
SanDisk, LG and Cisco. “With Zyme, we now have the information to plan our
business based on customer demand,” says Logitech’s director for global
market analytics in a note on Zyme’s website. Zyme handles data from 180
countries and the system receives 20,000 reports on sales transactions a
week. Sankaran declines to talk about revenue, but says Zyme today has an
over 75% market share of sales reports handled by third party operators.
“Our competitors are mostly small regional companies,” he says.
Sankaran grew up in Bangalore, studied in
IIT-Madras, where he graduated from in 1983, and then went to Yale in the
US for a Master’s in computer science. His first job was with
Hewlett-Packard. In 1998, he returned to India with the idea of starting
something here in IT services, but before long he got the feeling that the
thought was ahead of its time. So, in 1990 he returned to the US to consult
for HP, and a year later joined McKinsey where he spent six years. For a
couple of years after that, he ran the high-tech vertical of i2
Technologies, the supply chain management software and services company
founded by Sanjiv Sidhu and Ken Sharma in Dallas, Texas.
Towards the end of that decade, he left that to
found a company of his own called ClosedLoop Solutions, which was a
cloudbased enterprise budgetary and planning solution. It became a
successful startup, with customers like Caterpillar, Symantec and
Parametric Technologies. So successful that in 2003, it was acquired by
Lawson Software for $4 million.
It was in the months following that acquisition
that Sankaran saw the Zyme opportunity. And that opportunity remains huge
today, because 94% of the market still uses in-house solutions. Zyme is
also helping companies to move from weekly reports to daily and hourly reports
— in other words, almost real-time sales data from a fragmented retail
system spread across the globe.
“It’s important to believe totally in your idea,”
Sankaran says. “It’s also important to not get distracted. When we were
doing Zyme, we received an IT service request that would have earned us
three times our then revenue. But it didn’t fit into what we were building,
so we rejected it,” he says.
Sujit
John TOI 121219
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