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How IndiaMART uses analytics to deliver business inquiries

ET CIO

Dinesh Agarwal, Founder & CEO, IndiaMART, comes from a software technology background and believes that IT is a part of his DNA. In an interview with Salvi Mittal, Dinesh Aggarwal explains about how he is leveraging analytics at IndiaMART.

Q. Please describe the IT roadmap of IndiaMART?
80% of our infrastructure is on open source technology. We chose open source because it does not require any proprietary tie-up, is cost effective and supports modifications. Earlier we had in-house built ERP system, HR and E-mail systems but now we have been migrating our in-house systems on SaaS- based providers. Currently, we are using SaaS- based provider for HR System and are planning to migrate to a bigger SaaS platform. We are looking for an integrated HR platform as there are very little HR platforms available in SaaS model.

For marketing, we are already consuming Oracle responses and are also looking at other marketing solutions.

For server infrastructure, we are slowly augmenting form rational data base like Oracle Mysql, Cassandra because it has to be further more scalable. Tons of data has been stored in rational database which is now becoming difficult to manage. Rational data bases are good when it comes to optimizing the hard-disk space or storage space, thought the storage space is getting cheap nowadays. Today the essential part is to get the access of data in fractions of seconds.

We had web-based ERPs for sales and are also building mobile ERPs for sales-force automation, customer self on-boarding, and location detection. The mobile ERPs will mark the salesforce location while they are out to visit the customer and further use that to localize the searches. Presently IndiaMART has 25 lakh SMEs listed on its platform and will streamline entire IndiaMart’s ecosystem if we could map them down.

We are also using location based picture searches.

Q. How are you leveraging analytics?
On the IndiaMART platform, the buyer does not need to search, sort and select. We have RFQ system, where buyers can put in an RFQ on IndiaMart and suppliers can contact the buyers. And we run analytics on the data we receive to understand the location preference.

Every month a million plus RFQs are getting consumed by some 60,000-70,000 suppliers only. And these buyers and suppliers leave a lot of footprints; hence here we use data analytics very effectively.

We have data from 30 million+ buyers and 2 million+ supplier’s and deliver over 10 million business inquiries. So if we take last 5 years data we will have around 500 million business inquiries that IndiaMART has delivered. And now we are trying to sniff through that data to find out the trends and make it more analytics driven.

We are also looking at supplier’s self on-boarding. For example- 80% of suppliers that signs up are on IndiaMART’s mobile application and they could receive enquiries and RFQ alerts as they happens and can chat with the buyers. We are also working on mobile CRM for suppliers.

Q. How are SMAC technologies influencing the seamless customer experience?
We are more excited about mobile as the technology because we get location, access to the user’s address book and photo gallery. So our strategy is that all the three sets of users will remain there, desktop user will remain on desktop, there are occasional users who come on mobile website and there are the power users who use the application. All these users have different requirements and has to completely co-exist.