Made in India: Featuring WISH from Prologic First
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WISH, an integrated single-vendor product for the hospitality sector has evolved with the evolution of technology. But like other small companies in the country, the parent company Prologic First faces growth challenges even as it seeks to grow its international presence.
Quick Facts
Overview
Prologic First is a pioneer of sorts. Offering sophisticated and completely integrated software products and solutions for the hospitality sector, the company launched its first set of products in 1998, based on the then emerging Windows technology. The product was called WISH. Since then, keeping pace with evolving technologies, the company has attempted to upgrade competencies and constantly reinvent itself.
End –User scoring point
The hospitality products sector is a mature one, dominated by a single large vendor (Micros), with the remaining market space being fragmented amongst a number of smaller suppliers. In such a scenario, a USP-approach is unlikely to succeed. So Prologic First focuses on offering the ‘best value for money’. As an integrated single-vendor, single-server solution, WISH allows hotels to do away with multi-vendor solutions that use different vendors for different devices. With an integrated solution, the customer benefits from cost savings, ease of administration, and greater seamlessness and efficiency. The solution addresses most software needs of a hotel, across front and back office departments.
Competitive Positioning
Prologic First and WISH have a distinctive market positioning.
- A functionality-rich product that uses current technology: From WISH to WISH.NET, the product has evolved along with the evolution of technology. During the heydays of the .com era, Prologic First launched a web-based reservation system called WISH IRS, and three years ago, they were amongst the first to launch a handheld POS for use in food and beverage service operations.
- A product with innovative functionalities: According to Ghose, WISH is one of the ‘greenest’ products in the sector today, minimizing the use of paper through electronic approvals and transactions, electronic archiving of historical records, and offering high performance with minimal hardware configuration. WISH also offers some strong CRM features including comprehensive customer profiling systems, with profiles being more structured and providing actionable information beyond just data. Finally, WISH’s architecture is based on a single hotel operations database that caters to both electronic distribution and operations, offering the customer greater consistency of information and transactions across sales and operating channels, all this at competitive pricing.
- A proven solution: WISH, in whole or in parts, is used at more than 450 user sites internationally. Marquee customers include Oberoi Hotels in India, the Constance Group in the Indian Ocean Islands, Golden Tulip Hotels in the Middle East and the Cola Hotel Group in the UK.
Go-To-Market
WISH’s GTM strategy has twisted and turned with market conditions. Prologic First initially offered a Windows-based product, based on market conditions in 1998/1999. With the downturn in the IT sector post-9/11, revenue lines shrunk to ‘maintenance-only’ services. Over the last few years however, Prologic First has invested in re-inventing itself and catching the next technology wave early. This has given it some GTM advantages, says Ghose.
Prologic First works through affiliates who exclusively promote their products. While affiliates invest in growing markets and in maintaining the levels of technical excellence, the company in turn invests heavily in product upgrades, their training and technical support.
The company’s GTM strategy has always been to exploit geographical advantages. The company focuses heavily on developing/emerging markets, a segment that US-based vendors find difficult to enter and understand.
Finally, brand recognition and referrals play a major part in growing the customer base. Operating with minimum sales staff and promotional budgets, the company relies on word-of-mouth and customer ambassadors to grow and gain market share.
The Big Challenges
- One of Prologic First’s challenges today is leveraging the advantages it enjoys to fuel growth. A big need is developing more international sales channels, which is heavily dependent on the amount of investment the company can commit to growing its channels.
- The greater challenge is to find sufficient and trained manpower with the requisite skills.
- Finally, the biggest challenge the company faces today is finding an investor who is able to understand the prolonged gestation and appreciate the risks involved.
Success Quotient
“Why are we in this business despite all the challenges?” quips Ghose. “Well, what attracts us is the potential profitability.” According to the entrepreneur, the nature of the software product industry is such that the incremental manpower (and hence costs) required to achieve higher revenues is not directly proportional. Smaller companies cannot plan for growth that depends on proportionate increase in manpower because they may not be able to win talent against the larger players. Hence, what a company like Prologic First instead opts to do is capitalize on IPR.
Ghose also feels that his company is in the business of products in the truest sense of the word. When delivered to customers, their products do not require customization of software programs and code, and the company limits their technical services to software installation, user training and configuration. “Our ability, with a single copy of our source code, to satisfy diverse customers across many countries gives us satisfaction. We often hear the lament that India does not produce ‘international products’. We, in our small way, would beg to differ. And, are working to establish that India can,” ends Ghose.
My Word! A one2one take with Amlan Ghose, MD, PrologicFirst
NASSCOM: What if you could go back in time – would you change product strategy or go-to-market?
Ghose: Based on our initial success, we pressed the growth accelerator in late 2000 by investing in developing the Brazilian and UK markets, as well as by investing in .com. The succeeding downturn in the industry hit us badly, depleted our cash reserves and shelved our growth initiatives. This in turn meant that our recovery was slower than that of the industry as a whole. In hindsight, I now know that if we want to accelerate growth, we need investors to bolster our finances. Else, we must plan for only as much growth as can weather unforeseen setbacks. On the other hand, I would not change our product or GTM strategy. We did right on both fronts.
NASSCOM: Does India offer strategic advantages or even disadvantages when it comes to a product focused business?
Ghose: India offers one definite advantage. When we first entered the market, it was not dominated by a single vendor as it is today. There were a few significant players with well established products, but they were in the last stage of their lifecycles because they were unable to invest in upgrading the technology of their products. These were vendors based in the USA and West Europe, where product development costs are very high. As an Indian company we had the advantage of being able to develop new products and features at a fraction of that cost. We could add further competitive advantage by offering customization services at affordable prices.
However, we also face certain disadvantages. Our packaging is poor and our domestic market is not large enough to mitigate risks. By packaging I mean the look and feel of our software, the quality of our documentation, how we present ourselves, etc. We need to be more ‘slick’. The problem with our domestic market is that price points are, mostly, too low to encourage quality. Companies like ours can only succeed by making profits in the international market and ploughing this back into improving quality and presentation. Ironically, this does not often work in practice since normally quality is a pre-condition to success.
NASSCOM: How difficult was it to raise capital? Was this a growth issue?
Ghose: India offers many opportunities for an investor to earn faster returns with greater certainty than is possible in most product businesses. The product business has a long gestation cycle and is fraught with the risk of failure. Also, our usable funding needs are more modest than what leading VCs would want to engage in. If we found a patient investor, we would gladly seek funding. It would help greatly in our growth. The challenge is in finding such an investor.
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