The digital transformation drive had indeed got a tremendous push during the pandemic as organizations tried to ensure business continuity and resiliency with evolving and dynamic work environments. Though big organizations had prepared or had the resources to quickly transition to the new working norm, it was the small and medium enterprises that faced the brunt of the pandemic to their businesses. Helping the SMEs with their digital transformation journey while ensuring world-class software solutions of international standards is the Kolkata-based company, Mass Software Solution Pvt. Ltd. The company with its expertise in software development has helped many SMEs to realize their digital transformation journey with solutions that are secured, scalable and leverage the latest technologies to help future proof the clients. In an exclusive interview with SmartSateIndia, Mr. Bhaskar Ganguli, Director, Marketing and Sales, Mass Software Solutions Pvt. Ltd., shares his insights on the company’s marketing strategy for India and its ambition for expanding its services in the coming years.
Here’s an excerpt from the interaction:
Take us through the journey of Mass Software Solution, and the services you offer.
We started Mass Software Solutions in 2001 with a zeal to provide top-class solutions to clients. We focused mainly on website design and development, but the company strengthened and diversified our offerings over time. Our focus shifted from mere website design to high-end consulting and development solutions. Global clients engage us to help them identify their operational challenges and transform and automate their business processes. This started our journey into Digital consultancy and Digital transformation solutions.
In 2016, we moved to a spacious office with modern infrastructure to support our expanding client base and growing team. We have won the trust of numerous global customers and become their digital transformation partner. Our solutions have transformed how our customers operate and benefit immensely from it.
Today, we are a globally recognized digital transformation company providing web, mobile and digital consulting solutions to small businesses, agencies and enterprises. Additionally, we work with several IT consultants and companies in the US and the UK, where we have extended resources.
What is your USP that differentiates the company from the rest?
When it comes to IT services, many companies deal with a wide variety of technologies. However, most IT services companies provide the same development services. Our process uniquely defines us, where we adhere to international standards.
Since we are working with many clients worldwide, we understand their needs and know what each client needs and even depending on the geographic regions, their demands change. Then, customer communication is another part where we always get excellent customer feedback. And another unique aspect is that when we start working with a client, it’s often a long-term engagement. So even though it’s been there since we started with one or two small projects and we’ve been with the client for ten years, 15 years, our customer retention rate is pretty high. We get many referrals from our customers. Secondly, we can provide that service and benefit in terms of cost and expertise to other companies to rely on us for their development.
In terms of delivery and development, our processes are very transparent. Therefore, any company that joins us is sure about what they are getting and what they expect to get. They don’t expect any surprises, and they don’t get any surprises. Thus, our delivery promise, capability, knowledge, and expertise will be our key strength areas.
What are the types of challenges that your customers come up to you for your help and resolution?
Our customers are usually SMEs, where they will either have their own IT team or not. And they come to us for our expertise and knowledge in various industries and development processes. So, we look at the process, analyze them and give them a holistic solution on how digital transformation can help them and what we can do to ease their pain points and make them more effective and efficient.
The way we have streamlined this has helped many companies in their digital transformation journey. So, this is a huge area where customers come to us and ask for help and expertise in finding solutions and addressing their pain points, which we have done quite successfully over the years.
From your perspective, what software development trends do you see will be becoming more mainstream in the next 12-month period?
Crypto, AI, and ML would be very much used in various software development and clients’ general requirements. But from our perspective, digital transformation, especially in SMEs, where they do not have a current process in place, will play a significant role in the next, at least a year or so for us as well as we see in the market. Many smaller companies now want to digitize, bringing their information to a digital platform where they can analyze it and make well-informed decisions.
In the digitization or digital automation process, each company will need 360-of-a-kind views on its data, from customer acquisition to information processing to customer support. These companies will have data at their fingertips and make informed decisions based on the data, which they can validate to digitize processes. They can only aggregate information to process different outputs or aggregate data to process different results. Now, that whole thing is shifting to database decisions and outcomes.
What will be your advice to budding developers about the emerging technologies that they should focus on for their career growth?
Since we are mainly into building custom solutions for clients, we would require Node JS, and Python for the back end, then for databases PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MuleSoft 4 for in-memory databases from the budding developers. Cloud memory and DevOps, would be the main areas we would focus on as far as our company is concerned to provide what we want over the next 12 months.
Last two years have given a tremendous push to digital transformation. How was this period for you, and do you have any insights you would like to share from the implementations you did for clients during this shift?
In the last two years, especially during COVID, we have seen a trend where many companies are pushing for digital transformation because they have realized the necessity of it. And as far as we are concerned, our experience in security and scaling were the two most important aspects we brought into our development and deployment procedures. So, we implemented various kinds of web firewalls and field-level encryptions for security. Encryptions on data stored at rest or transit, and we also harnessed the power of cloud computing to scale our application. As a result, over the past two years, we have put a lot of emphasis on security and scalability, which are pillars for any MSMEs.
It was a bit difficult during the initial COVID lockdown in terms of business. However, it was on track for us last year, achieving around 20 to 25% growth. And we intend to do the same, if not more, this year. We also plan to add products to our offerings for a higher margin and are moving towards the target.
Kindly share your growth journey over the last few years, the challenges you overcame, and the services and solutions that drove your growth.
We have grown into a 100 members team over the years. In this journey, we have had our fair share of ups and downs. The lack of funds meant we had to bootstrap every inch of our way to reach where we are today as an organization eventually. While commencing operations for the first time is always challenging, maintaining growth and keeping up with the quality is difficult. Despite its initial difficulties, MSS managed to stay at the top with perseverance and dedication to its customers. A company is only as good as the people working for it. That’s why recruiting the right talent and retaining good resources is so critical for the consistent growth of an organization. We at MSS have nurtured budding talent and taken the necessary measures to recognize their efforts, which helped us overcome the challenges related to the workforce. Like others, we, too, witnessed obstacles in sales pipelines alongside the fierce competition from low-cost freelancers. But, as we catered to more customers, MSS rose in stature as a brand and gained the trust of its clients. This further allowed us to continue delivering on our vision of providing top-class web application solutions to our ever-growing list of global clients.
What are the key market segments you are targeting, and what are your service expansion plans for the coming years?
We work with MSMEs across all sectors in India and the globe. In terms of service expansion, we plan to grow Mass Software Solutions into a leading global enterprise solutions company. With off-shore and on-shore delivery centers, we aim to build solutions for enterprise clients and make a global impact.
We will focus on one product along with our learning management system and target corporates and large organizations. Companies can use the LMS for their benefit in terms of employee retention, employee knowledge enhancement, management, and employee talent and knowledge monitoring.
We aim to target IT companies and IT consultants in the US, UK, and the rest of the world. And we here in Kolkata have dedicated teams to serve them and their customers. So it is one of the significant goals apart from the usual services and products.
