The CII-cloudBuy initiative for B2B e-commerce dovetails neatly with the government’s push for Make in India.

When Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited UK in early November 2015, one of the agreements spotlighted in the package of Anglo-Indian trade initiatives was an extended contract signed by cloudBuy, the global provider of cloud-based e-commerce marketplaces and B2B buyer and supplier solutions, with Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), for an online business to business marketplace, implicitly recognising the importance of increasing trade between the two nations and cementing it via e-commerce. This followed months of preparation as the two parties had signed a MoU earlier and worked out the modalities. The result, an e-commerce portal www.CIITrade.in, will connect Indian businesses with new trading opportunities within the country and around the world. The portal will provide a gateway to global supply chains for CII members and other businesses in India, opening new vistas for business beyond the traditional markets.

According to the findings of a Walmart report on B2B e-commerce in India, the country’s B2B e-commerce industry holds a current valuation of US $300 billion and could rise as high as US $700 billion by 2020. India has one of the largest bases of Internet users in the world, and though the current online market is relatively smaller, it is now picking up rapidly in the B2C domain. In fact, the B2B online retail market is expected to reach double the size of the B2C online market, generating revenues of 6.7 trillion USD by 2020, according to Frost & Sullivan analysis on Future of B2B Online Retailing, which is part of its Visionary Innovation Research.

It is findings and reports such as this, apart from his extensive background in the financial markets that gives confidence to Nilesh Gopali, cloudBuy Country Head – India, who returned to the country of his birth last year after working in the UK for 16 years. “Developing the CII project and being recognised by the UK government as a great collaboration between UK and India, has been a fantastic endorsement of what cloudBuy has to offer,” he says. With an extensive background in the financial markets and leveraging his extensive C-Level Executive expertise, Nilesh was instrumental in launching a new UK High Street bank – Metro Bank – from scratch, Britain’s first new large retail bank in over 100 years. The success of the bank project is reflective of Nilesh’s ability to create a vision for cloudBuy, where he joined three years ago, and encapsulate it into an executable plan that delivers tangible results for stakeholders both within and external to an enterprise. He is one of the main architects behind the CII choosing to use the cloudBuy platform for their core membership. “Understanding both economies, I believe that the new CII gateway will accelerate the increase in trade between the two nations and I am very excited to be a part of the change,” adds Nilesh, referring to his cross cultural experience.

The company itself has an interesting history. Ronald Duncan, a former champion skier and Winter Olympian founded cloudBuy in 1999 (the company started as @UK and was renamed cloudBuy recently) with the vision to create a single e-commerce platform that could serve all of a company’s e-commerce needs, regardless of their customers’ characteristics. Duncan had engaged in computer software consultancy after retirement from active sports and had the necessary expertise. Along with his team he first created the B2B e-commerce engine for suppliers and later added an enterprise procurement capability and standard ERP integration for large buyers – as well as a host of other procurement-related services. The company realised early from what it had seen in the procurement sector that mere catalogue selling is not enough to cover everything an organisation buys. It was clear that the only viable way forward was through the application of B2B e-commerce – which addressed all of the complexity generated by real companies doing business with multiple clients in real time. The fact that cloudBuy emerged unscathed from the dotcom bust and lived to earn the sobriquet “Amazon for business’ tells a tale of sharp business acumen and a deep understanding of the procurement processes across industries and sectors, including working with the government, as some of the early successes of cloudBuy were achieved while working with the National Health Service and the universities in UK, demonstrating the substantial savings in the process.

The result is literally a solution ‘in-the-box’– and as simple as taking something out of the box and plugging it for use – the users actually can start just like logging on for email. cloudBuy’s ‘marketplace-in-the-box’ as the company calls it, brings together buyers and sellers to increase secure global trade, powering an increasing number of national and sector-specific marketplaces that bring buyers and sellers together. “Sellers are now considering e-commerce as a strategy. Our marketplaces offer information flow in a structured way, negotiations will be both structured and confidential in a transparent manner, and the online payment process secure, which meets the exacting Payment Card Industry (PCI) DSS Level 1 standard,” says Nilesh.

As an apex body of Indian industry, CII is not an intermediary to any transaction, but just a facilitator, and the service will be initially available even to the companies who are not members of CII, with some due diligence carried out to authenticate them. Such companies may in fact be encouraged to join CII as members in course of time. As Nilesh says, “Since the Indian government is making an all out effort to encourage global companies to trade with India, this initiative brings with it the high credibility of the CII and the trusted expertise of a third party site with proper authentication of both the parties – buyer and seller – with secure payment options.” cloudBuy has a strategic partnership with Visa Asia Pacific that brings together an ecosystem of suppliers and buyers. Regardless of geography, they can benefit from cloud-based, real-time integrated services including credit facilities – thereby enabling a safe, controlled and convenient online purchasing experience. The CII has around 8,000 members who cumulatively account for annual revenues of US$ 80 billion. Out of this, Nilesh expects transactions worth US$ 3-5 billion taking place on cloud platform in the near term, a figure that looks modest.

For large corporates who are already engaged in B2B transactions, cloudBuy interfaces smoothly with SAP/ERP and other software used by them to manage the procurement process. But it is the smaller companies, the MSMEs that can benefit greatly from the CII-cloudBuy deal. For these small and medium enterprises that may not have the resources but want to show they take e-commerce seriously, cloudBuy offers a range of templates and themes to quickly set up a fully functional e-commerce site, which is ready to trade in hours. “The SMEs will get level playing field with large corporates in terms of contacts with buyers worldwide something that does not happen easily or cost effectively in an offline environment. But they will also benefit with things like on time payments, which is an issue for most of them,” says Nilesh.

With the failure of major global players in the B2B e-commerce domain to effectively penetrate the market, cloudBuy is poised at the threshold of a major boom in this segment and has the expertise and resources in place, with tie-ups with strategic partners to make online transactions a seamless experience. The market is big enough for multiple players and in the short to medium run. But Nilesh has his work cut out for him as together with CII the service is rolled out across the country. With 60 plus branches and regular conferences and seminars held for sector specific programmes, the CII has a robust network in place to do so. He is brimming with confidence that this has the potential to strike a big blow for B2B e-commerce for Indian enterprises.

(The February 2016 edition of IPF would feature an article on how cloudBuy’s cloud based sales platform caters to OEMs/SMEs selling to Dealers & Distributors further on to Retailers before ending up with actual users, including OEMs/SMEs selling to corporates; resolves their sales issues whilst giving them benefits using e-commerce technology.)