‘Our focus is on innovation and new products’

Newgen Software Technologies, a global provider of Business Process Management, Enterprise Content Management, Customer Communication Management solutions, reported a robust 45% growth in consolidated net profit at Rs 73.7 crore for the year ended March 2018. In an interaction with Uma Kannan of DH, Diwakar Nigam, Chairman and Managing Director, Newgen Software Technologies, says the company’s focus continues to be on innovation and on launching new products/ features. Edited excerpts:

What are your new offerings? Do you have any particular focus area?

We are a software products company providing enterprise-wide, mission critical solutions helping organisations drive digital transformation and competitive differentiation through our three core transformative platforms; Business Process Management (BPM), Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Customer Communication management (CCM). It has been our continuous endeavour to deliver growth through constant focus on innovation. Our new offerings include Mobility, Virtual Repository Services, Dynamic Case Management, RPA with BPM, Digital Sensing and Flexible Designing and Authoring. We are scaling Cloud/ Saas business by increasing penetration and strengthening the platforms to meet all compliance/regulatory requirements.

Recently, Newgen announced the release of OmniScan 4.1. With this, organisations can now Scan, Digitise and Deliver critical business information to accelerate key business processes and enhance customer experience with this version. It’s effective bulk scanning and distributed capture capabilities help enterprises reduce costs, save time, and optimise resource utilisation. This version will help organisations drive enterprise-wide digitisation and access relevant information for business use. It provides flexibility to scale operations from hundreds to millions of documents in a day.

What were key drivers in the last fiscal and what contributed to your growth as the company reported robust growth during the last fiscal?

Newgen’s Consolidated Revenue from operations grew on the back of broad based growth and customer acquisitions across geographies. In FY18, we have continued our robust growth, profitability and cash generation momentum and witnessed strong interest across all geographies. We strengthened our global presence and witnessed strong interest for products with a broad-based growth (YoY) in APAC (47%), EMEA (45%), USA (7%) and India (7%). There has been a substantial number of customer wins during the year and we have won 120 new clients compared with 98 in the previous year. We have also continued to strengthen the horizontal product platform with vertical service accelerators.

We have strong industry recognition which validates culture of innovation. Newgen is positioned as a ‘Leader’ in Dynamic Case Management, Digital Process Automation and Enterprise Content Management by Forrester, a leading Independent Research Firm in its WaveTM Reports. It has also been positioned by Gartner in its Magic Quadrants.

What about India’s contribution and how are you planning to strengthen your business in India?

India contributed 35% revenue in our overall business in FY18. We have built high level domain expertise and created robust frameworks for Retail and Corporate lending which are successfully operating across banks and geographies. Our go-to-market strategy across regions and verticals is based on direct presence supported by partner ecosystem. We are exploring new geographies and attractive verticals in select mature markets including the US and UK. We continue to expand our product portfolio and continue R&D investments.

What will be the future of robotics process automation (RPA) and how well it is doing right now?

We believe that RPA automates manual processes that cannot be traditionally programmed. For instance, a call centre agent copying data from one screen to another. However, the call centre needs a supervisor who coordinates all activities on the floor. Similarly, for RPA to be truly effective, organisations would need a BPM platform to manage all the RPA bots in the organisation. Here, BPM plays the role of supervisor and provides guidance, coordination and intelligence. Newgen today is working with prominent RPA vendors to ensure that our customers get the full benefits of this technology.

What percentage of growth does Banking and Financial Services domain contribute?

The Banking & Financial Services vertical continues to be our stronghold and witnessed a YoY growth of 36%. We have built high level domain expertise and created robust frameworks for Retail and Corporate lending which are successfully operating across banks and geographies. We have witnessed large customer acquisitions in Banking & Financial Services domain, including some Fortune 500 companies.

Are you planning to increase the number of employees? What’s your game plan going forward?

Our total active customers as of March 31, 2018, was over 520. We currently have over 2,600 employees including 250 in R&D and over 270 in marketing and sales. Our focus continues to be on innovation and on launching new products/ features creating a highly connected and digital workplace. We are also looking at geo-expansion as a part of our long term plan.