Deskera Integrates Documents, Reports, and More Enterprise Tools for Asian SMEs

We recently featured Deskera CEO Shashank Dixit as he shared his sound advice for individuals who want to start their own enterprise-facing startup. This Sequoia-backed Singaporean firm has already been gaining traction among businesses in Asia. It generated more than $8 million in revenue just last year. So, what’s in it for Asia’s small- to medium-sized businesses (SMEs)?

Deskera is an enterprise collaboration suite that puts together Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, and project management tools so that it’s easier for businesses to organize data, reports, and documents.

Taking on SAP

Most SME owners will have heard of CRM and ERP solutions from big companies such as Oracle and SAP. What makes this startup’s offerings different?

Deskera is an open source and web-based service. Shashank says it’s a fully integrated solution – from CRM to HR to ERP and project management – so that everything is in one box, which he claims his bigger rivals don’t offer. It taps more into the SME segment in Asia. He explains further that Deskera stores all its customers’ data in a way that even the cloud provider – Amazon’s AWS – never gets access to it. He adds:

How do we prove it? Well, download our code and check it for yourself. There are no backdoors.

Adding languages, expanding to China

Shashank sees that this type of solution is currently tailor-made for SMEs, especially in Asia. He says that today, Asia has the more small and medium companies that anywhere on earth, and they’re also scaling up. And as they do this, Shashank says, “they look for value money factor” in the solutions they get.

Apart from that, Asian companies also worry about security. That’s why Shashank says that a solution must both be a good one and low-cost. And so Deskera’s collaboration suite starts at $12 per user.

Deskera won’t divulge its total number of customers in Asia, but Shashank says currently the main sectors it has tapped in Asia are manufacturing and service-related industries. So it is now looking to improve its applications for these segments. The improvement plans include adding in more tax codes, and other localization features like providing local languages.

Deskera is now present in many countries in Asia like India, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia, bolstered by offices in Malaysia, India, and North America. It will also be expanding to Vietnam and China soon.

(Editing by: Steven Millward)