MIS Drives Aspire's Marketing Strategy

Aspire Systems, a Chennai-based, outsourced product development company, specialising in software product engineering services has developed an in-house application called ‘Marketing Information System’ that serves as a key driver behind Aspire’s marketing strategy. It supports all marketing and sales activities within the company.

The system has three modules: Discovery module (data research team), Engagement module (campaign team) and Sales module (sales team).

Built on a J2EE environment, the Marketing Information System has SQL server for Database and works on Windows 2003 Operating System.

According to Shankar Krishnamurthy, CTO, Aspire Systems, “We have been developing this system continuously from 2001 onwards. Initially a core team with very good business understanding started developing this system. The system holds information of about 80,000 companies.”

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Cost effectiveness of MIS

By developing this application in-house, Aspire has been able to save on its IT Infrastructure spending. Deploying an application from an external vendor would have raised the cost at every business stage. The customisation cost in any application is high and according to Aspire any manpower addition in future would have only increased their expenditure. However, for their in-house venture, the company has hired only two people to enhance the application and update the same.

“Netsuite, salesforce.com, etc. have gained very good name but they are expensive compared to our system. Salesforce.com has a similar tool and we had many discussions on whether we needed a ready to use application from a vendor, but deploying that for ourselves would have cost us tremendously and the maintenance would have been an additional expense,” mentioned Shankar.

“Commercial systems cost anywhere between $10-65 per month per user. Our cost of maintenance and enhancement is only around 20-30% of the cost of external systems. This maintenance cost is also actually going towards improving the capabilities of our existing system,” Shankar added.

Plans to intro service around the concept

Aspire intends to continue with their own in-house application, considering that a solution from an external provider would not be effective enough. It also plans to add upgrades to the same in the near future.

“We are working on enhancing our marketing system to encompass CRM. Some of our existing customers have seen our marketing system and liked the capabilities. They wanted us to help them acquire new customers using the system. We are planning to introduce a new service around this concept. We are working on modifying our marketing system towards this.”

“Since we developed this system as an internal one, it was written for a single company’s use. If we have to extend this as a service for other companies, we need to modify the architecture with a focus on data security. We are continuously investing on this system to develop features like bringing in collaboration, Web 2.0 related features, reports, etc.,” concluded Shankar.