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Y-Axis not regretting the SaaS model

Whether it is agility, speed or culture; the company counts Salesforce as a good choice made well in time

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Pratima Harigunani
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INDIA: A lot has been said and is being said about the Cloud fork that Enterprise software road has taken. Promises and perceptions often dissolve into thin air unless they resonate with actual results and hands-on testimonials. Let’s take a reality peek with Xavier Augustin, Founder & CEO, Y-Axis on using Saleforce, advantage of prototyping,  comparisons with other options and, of course, on the GST D-Day on its way.

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Tell us about your journey with Salesforce so far?

We have been an early adopter of sorts, having started using it since 2009. The experience has been transformational in nutshell, and not in a one-off way. It has been a launch-pad for our success. It has helped us as we digitised processes, consolidated database in one place and made sure that our business runs in a transparent manner.

Any teething troubles or challenges you encountered?

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The thing about Salesforce is that you get what you see. It is not something that you put on paper and resolve later. The proof-of-concept and prototyping helps very quickly so you can jump to the environment quite fast. It is an 'easy to adopt' platform and one can what’s happening in a very visible way.

Have you never compared this choice with the new push that big ERP players have made or the niches that Infor, Epicor etc. created?

In 2009 itself, there were players in the cloud space already. In India too, there were ample options but no one was as big as Salesforce. Over the years this company has become dominant not only from the angle of numbers but also in the way the product itself has evolved. Also, other people are making applications on the platform and those can be just plugged and played. That creates a lot of other products that fit into Salesforce.

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Other big names are still grappling with this space and are trying to work out with their legacy solutions. Although attempts like Microsoft 365 are fantastic, I am not sure if anyone can catch up on CRM where Salesforce has enough of a lead already.

How important is technology per se, to your business model?

It affects every aspect of our business, be it profiling, evaluation, anything. We have several customers across many geographies and we have to be sensitive, empathetic in providing solutions. Workflows from one department to another have to be smooth and with Salesforce we get this support without downtime issues. We do what we are good at in the career counseling industry and Salesforce takes care of what it is expert at.

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Anything exciting next?

We have been using Heroku for last two years and Salesforce Connect is a good way to search across databases. Salesforce builds a collective wisdom for our company with a lot of predictive intelligence thrown in.

Are you dreading the GST onslaught?

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Since we are into services domain, this may not be a relevant concern. The solutions we are using make the business so transparent that for people who use two types of accounts can’t use Salesforce to begin with. India is going through new changes – cashless economy, cloud etc, and it is going to be exciting.

What would you advise to other businesses that might be contemplating a SaaS choice?

One should clearly assess how wide the scope of adoption is because the platform is a culture-changing one. It is not about just converting an Excel sheet into a database. Electricity was not invented to replace candle. It is another animal altogether. If you want to adopt the platform, it has to be in entirety and across the board to work better.

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