From its origins as Aditi’s flagship product, Talisma eventually became a separate company. Today it offers hosting and outsourcing in addition to its product offering. Prashant Rao finds a company proud of its Indian lineage—and ready to take on competition

Ravi Chakravarty says client acquisition has been good ever since the company revamped the product into an end-to-end CRM product

For a company that started life with one product, selling what had earlier been Aditi’s flagship CRM tool (from which it took its name), Talisma has come a long way. Today the company has a fresh business model in place. “Talisma is uniquely placed as it is the only company in the world to offer product, hosting and outsourcing,” says Rekha Menon, Talisma’s vice-president for the Asia Pacific region and country manager.

It all began in Netquest, the company founded by Pradeep Singh, which would later change its name and become Aditi. The company initially handled support activities for Microsoft. From the experiences of the support team, a CRM product was conceived. Three to four months before the product was released in 1998 it was still going by the name of Customerdesk, which not very catchy. It was a marketing whiz at Aditi who coined the name Talisma (derived from Talisman—a magical object).

Talisma, the company, was born in 2000.

The vision
The vision was to build a company with a global brand name. “The first step was to put ‘Made In India’ in the splash screen in Talisma 4,” says Chandrashekar Shetty, VP, offshore services & IT, Talisma.

Talisma has now 500 employees, of whom 400 are in India. The overseas team is composed of sales and professional services staff in the US and Europe.

Strategy
The company is focusing on Customer Service Management, both through its products and its outsourcing solutions. Of late there has been an increased emphasis on services built around the core CRM product. Going after outsourcing work in the CRM space is the latest thrust. The company recently won an implementation project involving 1,800 field sales users. It undertook a pilot (one module at a time) with a subset of forty users and did fine-tuning and enhancements at this stage.

Single code base
Talisma was rewritten in the early days, but from version 2 onwards the code base has remained the same. This has significant advantages in time-to-market and adding features, as developers are familiar and comfortable with the existing code. The architecture has proved to be robust and scaleable as Talisma has moved into the enterprise CRM space.

Track record
Talisma has sold its product to 500 customers since version 2. Of these, 120 are active customers. Another 30-40 still use the product but they are not approaching the company for support. The geographical split of installed seats works out to roughly 70 percent in the US, 15 percent in Europe and 15 percent in the Asia-Pacific. Over the years, the product has grown in complexity and become an enterprise CRM software tool. As a result, the average sale price of Talisma has shot up five-fold from $40,000 to $200,000.

Sales
In April 2000, Talisma was an e-mail management product that was bought by dot-coms whose entire business, and thereby customer interaction, was on the Net. Overall, in the Asia-Pacific, Talisma was being sold to service providers, e-businesses and dot-coms. “We anticipated the dot-com meltdown...the segment vanished in March 2001. We revamped the product into an end-to-end CRM product by adding features supporting marketing and sales. Since then, our client acquisition has been good,” says Ravi Chakravarty, Talisma’s director of sales for the Asia-Pacific.

He adds, “We realised that CRM was a nascent market much like ERP was in 1993-94. Software adoption in India is driven by MNCs as part of their global rollouts. Once a critical mass of four to five implementations take place, Indian players follow suit.”

Indian companies may have finished their ERP implementation, but they haven’t been bitten by the CRM bug—as yet. MNC implementations of CRM haven’t taken place in India. “This year people are putting their internal team in place, budgeting is being done, and presentations are being made to top management,” explains Chakravarty. He expects clear budgets for CRM next year. BFSI shows promise. Basically, core-banking systems need to be in place as CRM won’t function without a centralised data store. Greenfield ventures and JVs are more open to such concepts as they have a core system in place from their international partner and they need a system that will aid them in the task of acquiring customers. Computer-related services (call centres) is another segment that is displaying interest. Telecom (fixed and cellular), pharma, consumer durables, hospitality and ISPs are also possible markets for Talisma. (At present, financial services and computer-related service companies are Talisma’s target audience in India.)

Talisma runs up against Siebel, Oracle, and SalesLogic in India. Indian companies often have homegrown tools and that’s the biggest headache for a CRM product company.

Rekha Menon says Talisma is uniquely placed as it is the only company in the world to offer product, hosting and outsourcing

Outsourcing
In January 2002, the company was reorganised into three units focusing on Indian sales, outsourcing and expert services (seven productised services).

“The software licences market had slowed down. We decided to leverage the India business model for services by offering offshore services. The division was formed in April-May 2002,” says Shetty.

The offshore services division, with over 200 people, was put together by knitting various services teams that had mushroomed in Talisma over time. Talisma has a dozen customers in outsourced support. It received COPC certification in July, only the third company in the world to get unconditional certification. The company’s focus is on technical support. This is broken into three areas: low-end customer support, technical support (the company offers tech support for Real Networks and Microsoft), and developer/engineering support (Merant is a customer in this space). Low-end support is usually undertaken for a client who is already doing business with Talisma; the company does not actively go after such work. In most cases, this involves helpdesk outsourcing for products such as MS Office or Windows.

Hosted services
Talisma is offered via an ASP model based on Citrix Metaframe. Pricing is worked out based on the product licences (number of users), usage (which modules are being used) and is charged on a monthly basis with an annual contract in place.

The company does 99 percent of the internal offshore product support out of India; a team of 20 people handles this task. Talisma handles outsourced business across media, though a particular customer may outsource only one channel, such as phone/e-mail or chat.

The company uses any CRM tool, be it Siebel, Kana or its own product. Talisma (the product) is used internally by sales and HR, and as an internal CRM tool for the company’s support portal.

Future plans
In version 5 of the CRM software, the company is focusing on service areas. The aim is to make Talisma more scalable, incorporate new architectures such as .NET (ASP.NET for the Web client). Talisma is currently moving its intranet to .NET.