When you exit the lockdown: A bigger IT bill for the MSME

The lockdown was not something that anyone planned for. It is what is called a black swan event—something that is extremely rare and whose impact is severe, writes Krishna Kumar, Chief Executive Officer of KREATIO Software.

During the lockdown, some businesses continued to run. Meanwhile, others had to shut down. Those that continued to run had to use a host of IT solutions to do so. There were broadly five groups of technologies that came to the aid of businesses during this time.

1. Mobility: Needless to say, this was the most important of all the technologies that enabled people to work from home. The equation is very simple. People who had notebooks could work from home. People who had office desktops could not. While some offices did send desktops home, that is not a regular solution. Today, you can buy a decent notebook starting Rs. 35000. All the more reason why employees should be given notebooks and not desktops!

The other part of mobility is an Internet connection. Wi-Fi hotspots from mobile phones have now become an accepted for Wi-Fi on the move. Mobile packages offer data and add on data plans at affordable prices on phones. These are usable from almost everywhere.

2. Text chat: Text Chat is immensely useful in the workplace. And the lockdown and work from home made it even more powerful. Many organizations were already using text chat. And those that were not, moved quickly to Whatsapp and Skype.

3. Video Conferencing: Video conferencing really came of age during the lock down. Video conferencing was being used to stay in touch with relatives, friends, colleagues and clients. What helped this was the generous free accounts allowed by all the players. Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, all contributed to this. It is a moot question whether post lockdown the accounts will continue to be free. Most have already stated that the accounts are free only during the pandemic.

4. Webinars: Businesses had no choice but to cancel all their conferences and ground events. Many of these were replaced by webinars. Many training sessions got replaced with webinars. Goto Webinar, Microsoft Teams or even the desktop sharing option of Zoom was used to run webinars. Going forward I see a lot more of webinars happening. Again, how long can you keep using these webinar solutions for free is an open question.

5. Document sharing and editing: Many people may not recognize this as an important requirement. And I am not talking of text documents. I am talking of designs, diagrams and the like. Documents that need specialized software to display. There are a number of services that allow you to create and share them online. Create.ly, Autocadd Webapp, lucid charts... The list is long as here we are talking about specialized software.

The country is slowly coming out of the lockdown. Will MSMEs continue to use these tools? Or will they go back to the old ways?

One thing is clear—people have become used to remote and technology enabled ways of working. And this is going to continue for some time to come. There are those who have been using simple or free services like WhatsApp or Gmail. They will face pressure to move up the value chain to tools, that ensure confidentiality, privacy and continuity.

Confidentiality and privacy are easy to understand, but what is continuity? Consider that you were using WhatsApp or personal Skype accounts. When the employee leaves the organisation, they carry away with them all records of conversations and copies of documents with their personal accounts. This is a huge loss to the organisation. your clients may not want their business secrets and plans to be carried away by individual employees. Thus, the need for confidentiality and continuity will put pressure on organisations to move away from these personal accounts and services to corporate accounts over which the organisation has control. This will be true for large organisations, as it is for MSMEs.

But these are the tools that were free during the lockdown, and they will stop being so. Where does that leave the MSME? Simply put, with a larger monthly IT bill!

At the other end, you can run your own servers for many of these services. For example, you could run your own email server. There are many available. You could run your own chat server using a tool like Rocket chat. You can run a video conferencing server using software like Jitsi. But it requires a lot of IT skills to set them up and to ensure that they are running properly. Else they can be troublesome for the users. Ensuring this requires an IT team. And that might be an even bigger cost!

So, whichever way we look at it, MSMEs are going to face a bigger IT bill, post slowdown.