A recent study by management consulting firm Zinnov says that digital enablement is going to present a $25.8 billion opportunity for tech vendors by 2020. India is home to over 51 million small and medium enterprises (SMEs). While only 40% are influenced by technology today, that figure is expected to increase to 90% by 2020.
“IT adoption by SMEs in India is hindered because of inability to easily adopt solutions meant for large enterprises. They aren’t in a position to invest upfront in infrastructure, most solutions offered to them in the market are generic and lack vertical centricity, and majority of the solutions are feature-rich solutions with high learning curve,” says the study.
Seeing the opportunity, Akash Nangia, former vice president of restaurant discovery company Zomato, along with Arjun Mittal, launched technology discovery platform, Tech Jockey, to work as a personalised IT guide for healthcare, fashion, retail, education and hospitality and jewellery making units. Tech Jockey aggregates software or even hardware solutions from small or large partners/ vendors to offer industry specific IT solutions. Similar to Zomato, the listings at the platform has review and rating capabilities for better decision making.
“We act as an IT solutions and consulting services to SMEs. For example, a restauranteur would get to choose right options for recipe management software, billing, inventory management, security, restaurant management system, etc,” said Nangia, co-founder and director, Tech Jockey.
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The start-up has about 1500 partners including vendors such as Zoho, Tally, Team Viewer, Microsoft, IBM, F-secure, Adobe, VM Ware, Amazon Web Services, Corel and Blue Coat. “We expect 5000 partners by March 2017, and connect with 10,000 by end of 2017,” he said.
Tech Jockey aims to enable SMBs such that they do not have to depend on too much human intervention in their day-to-day work-life. “For this, we intend to make a universe of all the 10,000-plus small software solution companies by the end of 2017, present even in remote areas in India on a single platform that allows SMEs to get end-to-end services on demand. In a nutshell, we are telling SMEs to leave IT to us,” said Nangia.
It claims to have clocked sales of R1 crore in the first three quarters of FY 2016-17. The Gurgaon headquartered start-up has a presence in Mumbai, Bengaluru and Chandigarh, and will expand its operations to Pune, Jaipur and Hyderabad by March 2017.
Tech Jockey is backed by SISL, which was started by the same founders back in 2012 to push technology into the public sector. SISL Infotech is one of the 34 companies shortlisted as GST Suvidha Providers to help businesses/tax payers/ SMBs comply with the new GST law. Nangia and Mittal thought that if given a platform, even the smaller software companies would have a chance to make some mark, if their product was good enough.
“Requirement was of a simple UI that doesn’t make software buying/selling too complex, so we segregated the software as per different businesses like hotels, hospitals, manufacturers, colleges and media houses,” said Nangia.
