Cnetric is enabling brick and mortar SMBs to tap into e-commerce

This article is a part of a 4 part-series sponsored by IBM.

The surge in online expenditure globally shows the impact of e-commerce in the retail sector. According to reports, it has been estimated that global business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce spending will grow at a CAGR of 12.7 per cent to reach US$ 1,285 billion in 2015. In key Asian markets such as India and China, this growth trend is spurred with increase in consumer spending.

Many new e-commerce players have emerged aggressively across the globe, adding value to the retail services; and the Indian market is not far behind. To cash in on this market boom, many companies are exploring ways of leveraging e-commerce with an aim to drive sales and improve customer interaction. And one player in this market is enabling traditional brick and mortar retailers to implement strategic, enterprise-class e-commerce faster.

Founded in 2003, Cnetric provides small and medium business (SMB) retailers with a cost-effective, scalable e-commerce platform to create and maintain online stores to address their specific business needs and expand their market reach. The platform is hosted on the cloud to take advantage of cutting-edge technology for a more robust and secure infrastructure at a lower cost than traditional in-premise hardware investments.

The company refines its services and technology deployment capabilities constantly to keep up with evolving e-commerce demands, thereby helping retailers to deliver an enriched online shopping experience. The increasing demand for a comprehensive and flexible e-commerce solution to support dynamic online business models at an optimized cost combined with the use of business analytics to capture valuable customer insights and effectively influence buying decisions, led to the development of the Cnetric Commerce-as-a-Service solution.

The Cnetric CaaS solution also empowers customers who lack in-house IT infrastructure by providing a software-on-cloud based architecture. The solution is provided as an OPEX-based service targeted to the mid-market segment.

“Uptime and less investment on hardware are some of the drivers for moving to the cloud model. In addition, mid-market always prefers an OPEX-based model to get service,” says Manohar Durai, President and CTO of Cnetric.

Cnetric wanted an India-based cloud infrastructure provider so it chose IBM Softlayer to provide platform-as-a-service for its customers. “Customers are very particular about data centres being in their own country. IBM has its data centres in India which is preferred by our Indian customers,” adds Mr. Durai. He further says, “IBM is also better in terms of hardware specifications on which it supports cloud. IBM cloud is more secure and comes with end-to-end solution, which is advantageous for customers.”

Cnetric ventured on its cloud journey by building a team with strong knowledge and expertise in virtualization, configuration, and environment setup for e-commerce which, in partnership with IBM SoftLayer, created a robust and scalable foundation for the Cnetric Commerce-as-a-Service solution.

Reduction in cost of IT is one of the key benefits observed by Cnetric after moving to cloud. “Most of our solutions are leveraging the cloud infrastructure. This has reduced our capital expenditure, and we in turn pass on the benefit to our customers so that they do not have to invest on software and hardware separately to run their business,” explains Mr. Durai. Cnetric has seen a steep reduction in cost of bandwidth by 60-70 per cent and cost of operation by 50 per cent. The cost of investment has also fallen by 50 per cent. With deep experience in e-commerce and the cloud, Cnetric is revolutionizing the retail SMB segment by enabling organisations to plan and implement an effective e-commerce strategy without blowing budgets.