With a medium height, heavy eyebrows and framed glasses, its not hard for anyone to guess that Danish Zafar is either a chartered accountant or an IT expert, a typical outlook common in both kinds of Professionals. But he is both, an accountant and an IT expert.
Danish, who is a Chartered Accountant by qualification, started his company DYS Solutions back in 2006 when he was a student. After five years in business and with several trials and tribulations, he’s planning to aim for Pakistan’s SME sector and compete with the giants in ERP market.
So what struck him to start a career in this field? ” I started my career with internship in a chartered accountant firm (Riaz Ahmad, Saqib, Gohar & Co).
Actually the chartered accountant firm I worked with mostly dealt with SME and medium enterprises so during my training I got well versed with the their norms and general business cycle, so from the experience I learned in those years helped me a lot in identifying the needs for an online application”, he said.
“Like most college students, at that time I was also running after IT and programming courses knowing the fact that IT will be the next big thing in the market so I had some interaction and interest with software application in my student life and that helped me a lot in starting with my own application”, he added.
On a question of how hard it could be for him to compete with SAP and Oracle, two leading technology giants in ERP solutions, he said that that solutions from SAP, Oracle and Microsoft GP are either not targeted for SMEs or even if they have, they are not cost effective for most entrepreneurs in Pakistan, especially Micro-enterprises.
“The Solutions we are offering are designed keeping in mind the average budget and requirements of SMEs in Pakistan. The problem with most of the Software Houses in Pakistan is that they are already stuck to desktop based environments for the last 10-15 years and changing platform is like rebuilding the whole structure again and involves heavy transition cost. Luckily at the time we started people are already shifting towards web based platform (like ASP and PHP) so we didn’t have to incur any extra transition cost, as we already started off with a web based platform i.e. PHP.”
“I believe we have an edge over the conventional software houses in terms of the cost and investment incurred over our project, and we are able to offer competitive and cost effective solutions”, he added enthusiastically.
So what’s Next?
“At DYS Solutions, we have 20 or more clients in our portfolio and most of the clients are from Retail and Trading sector”, Danish told us.
“Going forward we are planning to build support and related applications which will be integrated with our core ERP. Currently projects which are in pipeline are attendance system, HRM and CRM”, he added.
“We are Banking on Pakistan’s dynamic and fast growing SME sector”, he added with a smile.
Courtesy – Economy Age
