Brief on my GITEX visit and what led to Frappe Local Dubai
It was only a week after I returned to Mumbai, our UAE partners, Craft Interactive & Quark Cyber joined hands to announce the first UAE event, Frappe Local - Dubai. For me, having the Craft and QCS team collaborating, being competitors, was a first win.
We soon started to plan the event like scheduling talks and have registration page up. In around 2 weeks, we had to get 120+ people to attend. It wasn’t easy, given that we were doing an event on a weekend. However, we got a better response than anticipated. We had to halt new registrations two days before the event.
Also, we could attract a nice mix of audience. About half of the people were new to the community. They are auditors and chartered accounts who have significant influence in the decision making on which ERP a company should go with. The remaining 50% were the ERPNext / Frappe users and service providers from the community.
Here is the quick brief on the talks which were conducted in the conference.
Umair, Frappe Technologies PL
I kick-started the event with the talk which highlighted:
* Frappe’s journey from inception, bit of open-source gyan (for newcomers) and how it aligns with Dubai’s accommodative culture
* What is Frappe Framework and how FrappeCloud (our bread and butter 🙏) simplifies your deployment needs.
* And the core benefits offered to community for being 100% open-source like, Zero license fee, Unlimited users, security and focus on product quality
* After a quick Q&A, I continued with the second talk of hands-on session on V15 upgrades in Frappe Framework, ERPNext and new products like Frappe CRM, Insights and builders
Bibin, Quark Cyber
One of the crucial factors for the successful event was that we confidently spoke about UAE localisation fulfillment in ERPNext. Thanks to the Frappe community who made contributions, ERPNext was capable of generating tax invoices and providing reports as per the tax authorities demand. Bibin show-cased this capability with test data.
Suresh Kumar, Craft Interactive, India
Suresh is a chartered accountant, and most reliable to talk about something many accountants and business owners were confused about. The upcoming Corporate Tax. He elaborated the idea of corporate tax and its implications. For the cherry-on-top, Craft Interactive team came prepared with some POC which highlighted that ERPNext would be ready to accommodate the corporate tax, with some enhancement and configurations.
Hossam, General Manager, National Engineering Services
Hossam was a developer by hobby, right from his college days. However, destiny required him to assume much broader responsibilities of management, which didn’t allow Hossam to be hands-on with development for a long time. However, when he joined NEST and discovered Frappe and ERPNext, he revived his childhood passion for building stuff. In this talk, he proudly mentioned the customizations he proudly managed himself, and some with the QCS team.
Zaim Azrak, CEO, Location Solutions
Zaim initiated a company offering a vehicle tracking and telemetry system in UAE, and other GCC countries. While products were doing well, scaling-up operations became a bottleneck in the overall growth of the company. They tried their hands with Ramco, which scale-up along the company. George, Zaim’s elder brother who was a VP for technology for Domino's Pizza US, realized that they needed a scalable software platform rather than just an off–the-shelf fancy ERP suite. For their need of owning a platform, an open-source solution was the only option. Within open-source ERP space, they didn’t find many alternatives, and Frappe became a de-facto choice for them.
Frappe’s local partner, Quark Cyber helped them like a pro in going live with vanilla ERPNext, and deliver some critical customizations which included dual serialization and host of custom doctypes.
As they look back now, it was solely due to Frappe / ERPNext implementations, Location Services would scale-up their operations and grow by revenue by 2x
Vivek, Founder of Quark Cyber Solutions (QCS) UAE & India
Vivek initiated their journey of discovering Frappe and ERPNext as amateur and rebellious entrepreneurs. He started his journey as a solopreneur in 2013 after seeing the need for cost effective solutions in the middle after the 2008 financial crash. While they struggled & learned the business tricks, they were sharp to be handy with Frappe products, way earlier than others in the UAE market. The first mover advantage means a lot.
With time, they positioned themselves from serving SMB’s to large scale businesses, along with developing Frappe Apps as an asset. It was only a couple of months ago, they bagged a project from the most prestigious construction company of the world, EMAAR. If you have seen light-shows at Burj Khalifa, you are bound to notice EMAAR as a company who built Bujr Khalifa.
Apart from constructing monumental projects, they also manage a host of properties. Each of their properties has hardware devices like biometric, facial recognition, ANPR cameras and other IOT devices. Each property had different hardware and backend. This scenario didn’t allow them to manage all of these devices from a uniform platform. QCS team delivered them a Frappe App which helps EMAAR team operate their entire IOT devices & perform analytics from a single platform for all their properties
QCS team saw the scope to productify their build for EMAAR, and why not. They named their Frappe App as Communi-link. It manages IOT devices from different vendors at different sites on a single centralized platform.
After Vivek's talk, Delwin from Craft Interactive team took the stage.
Delwin Arackal, Craft Interactive, UAE
Delwin is an investment-banker turned entrepreneur, who has been sailing the boat along with Neji. Craft has been in existence since 2017, and has established themselves as a most experienced partner in the entire GCC region. They proudly claim having done close to 250 ERPNext implementations, across domains. Also, they soon graduated to Silver Partnership, as they have been hosting close to 90 sites on FrappeCloud. As we appreciated this milestone, I took an opportunity to make a jibe at a community, saying that, “if you at all wonder how we can give back to Frappe, FrappeCloud is the easiest way. And Craft guys have already shown the path to the community.”
Post introduction, Delwin initiated inviting his customers to share quick “youtube format like” talks, where customers talked highly about Frappe / ERPNext as a product and Craft’s services.
Jithin Anthony, Avientik Group
Avientik group is a prominent distributor of audio visual products in UAE. They were reeling from legacy accounting and ERP solutions. Jithin, the Finance Head at Avientik took a lead in upgrading their software stack with ERPNext. Along with Craft Interactive, they were able to meet a very tight-time for the deployment and make it a success, through ERPNext Avientek has brought their multi-country businesses and entities under one solution.
Sandeep Kumar, Megarme - Member of Palfinger Group
Palfinger is one of the most credible names in the Maritime and supply chain industry of UAE. Sandeep from Palfinger is a Supply Chain Manager at Frappe. He spoke enthusiastically of being able to map their operations along with Frappe and a custom build app by Craft Interactive team for the map of the Marine Business specific use-cases. The solution delivered by Craft through a custom Frappe App couldn’t have been imaged in an off-the-shelf product or without digging a deep hole in their pocket for customization. With Frappe, they got the experience of custom made solutions, at the cost of off-the-shelf solutions. Best of both worlds.
Joy Chackappan, SDC group
SDC Group is engaged in traditional business as import, export, off-shore trade and domestic wholesale. Joy is a Finance Controller who leads ERPNext implementation, along with the Craft Interactive team. Pleased to see the crowd at the event, he said, “it’s a great relief to see so many people using ERPNext within UAE. We don’t feel lonely anymore”. Community is one of the most crucial elements of an open-source ecosystem. It was great to see this gap getting filled with Frappe Local Dubai.
Ketan Bagia, Bulandi group
Ketan has colossal experience of delivering IT services in the healthcare industry. He shared an interesting story of discovering Frappe through his friend in Tanzania, while he was stuck there during the covid lock-down. In those critical times for the healthcare industry, Ketan took on the challenge of delivering the Frappe Healthcare module for a facility in Tanzania, along with his friend Mitesh Choksi, who was a certified Frappe Partner. The project was a success, and Ketan naturally enrolled as a Frappe Community member.
After Covid, he joined Bulandi Group, a distributor of beauty and healthcare products as a CEO. For him, ERPNext was already sorted as a default ERP. He inquired with Mitesh for implementing ERPNext at Bulandi Group. Mitesh trusted Craft guys more to deliver it, as they had a local presence. That’s the community spirit. For Craft’s team, it was a been-there-seen-it scenario, as they had implemented ERPNext for quite a few distributors already. One more success story crafted by Crated Interactives.
Priyanka, Frappe Technologies PL
Priyanka was born and raised in Sudan, and hence well-versed in the Arabic language. She is a natural fit to collaborate with partners from the Middle East.
Priyanka helped community members to view the evaluation process by prospects, and how much weightage they give to the certified partner. No matter how good a product is, when it comes to success, the quality and readiness of the partner become very crucial. Hence, customers prefer working with certified and authorized Frappe Partners as much as possible. After setting her case straight, he briefed the audience on the benefits of becoming a Frappe Partner.
Dharmesh, Frappe Technologies PL
Dharmesh comes with 10+ years of experience in the ERP industry. He is a Customer Success Manager (CSM) at Frappe for the Frappe’s enterprise customers in the Middle East. In my opinion, Dharmesh understands the dynamics of the ME market best among us, and knows the best route to travel within UAE and beat traffic. Dharmesh shared the stories of some of his customers who were reeling with bad ERPNext implementation, thinking they could do it alone with the partner. It’s a general tendency, and often bites back, esp. In the complex use-cases. Dharmesh has rescued my such projects and explained how having Frappe can boost the overall success rate for your enterprise projects.
Conclusion
If this you are thinking it’s too long an article (me too ;)), we have perhaps covered only 5% of what the UAE community has already achieved. We are just beginning to discover the stories, and there is a long way to go. The market is clearly demanding us to think about UAE and the entire ME lot more seriously, and get even more local. We hear you, and we are responding to it. We just got FrappeCloud hosting in UAE and KSA.
Just like Joy mentioned that “we don’t feel alone now”, the same applies to our efforts in the region. We have a fantastic Frappe community in middle east to support us. And once you have “the people” along, you know, revolution is just around the corner. Just the matter of holding-on, till it’s your time.
Ending with the candid pic of ex-Frappian meeting at the event.
Ajay Jaiswal (second from left) sand Bhumika Kothari (extreme right).
