I keep coming back to a number. 35,000. That’s roughly how many SAP ECC customers exist globally, and by Gartner’s count, less than 40% of them had actually migrated to S/4HANA by the end of 2024. December 31, 2027 is when mainstream maintenance for ECC 6.0 ends. Extended maintenance buys another three years, until 2030, at a premium. After that, you’re running an unsupported ERP that touches finance, procurement, supply chain and manufacturing at some of the largest companies on the planet.
People have started comparing this to Y2K. I understand the instinct, but I’d frame it differently. Y2K was a fixed technical bug with a fixed technical fix. This is a forced re-platforming of enterprise data at a scale most CIOs have never had to think about, on a timeline they don’t fully control, into an architecture that punishes them economically for bringing along everything they’ve accumulated over twenty or thirty years.
That last part is where I think there’s a real, underappreciated business sitting for a company like Solix Technologies. Let me walk through why, and then let me tell you honestly where I think Solix will fumble it if nothing changes.
Do the arithmetic on that 35,000 number. Roughly 14,000 organisations had migrated by end of 2024. Basis Technologies’ own adoption model, built from SAP and Gartner data, projects only about 57% of ECC customers will have completed the move by the time mainstream maintenance ends in 2027. That leaves somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 enterprises worldwide who still have to move a live, mission-critical ERP system in the next few years, on a services market that is already tight on SAP-certified talent.
Now here’s the thing that most of the coverage misses. Nobody migrating from ECC to S/4HANA is doing a simple lift and shift of their entire database. And that’s not a technical inconvenience, it’s an economic constraint baked into the architecture itself.
SAP HANA runs on in-memory computing. Data that used to sit comfortably on disk now competes for space in RAM, and RAM at enterprise scale is expensive in a way spinning disk never was. So the moment a company decides to move to S/4HANA, someone in finance is going to ask a very reasonable question: why are we paying premium infrastructure cost to keep twenty years of closed purchase orders, settled invoices and completed projects sitting in active memory?
A 30 TB legacy SAP database is not 30 TB of live, operational data. A meaningful chunk of it, often the majority, is dead weight retained mostly because someone, somewhere, is worried about a tax authority or a regulator asking for it seven years from now. Moving all of that into HANA makes no economic sense, and increasingly, CFOs are the ones saying so, not just the IT architects.
This is precisely the gap that application retirement and data archiving exist to close. Identify what’s actually needed for the go-forward system, archive the rest into a compliant, queryable, low-cost repository, and shrink the database that actually needs to move. Smaller database, faster migration, lower infrastructure bill, lower risk. That’s not a nice-to-have step in an S/4HANA project. For any enterprise with a genuinely old SAP footprint, it’s close to a prerequisite.
This is Solix’s home turf, and to be fair to them, they’ve built real product depth here. SOLIXCloud Enterprise Archiving covers database archiving, application retirement, file archiving and email archiving under one roof. Their retirement play doesn’t stop at ECC either, they’ve built out multi-system retirement across SAP satellites like BW, CRM, SRM and GTS, retiring them into a single governed archive with native understanding of SAP’s own archive object semantics through the Archive Development Kit and Information Lifecycle Management framework. That’s not a trivial thing to replicate. Understanding how SAP structures archive objects, and being able to retrieve that data years later in a form that satisfies an auditor, is domain expertise, not generic storage.
Their pitch is straightforward and it’s the right pitch: identify static and rarely used data before migration, archive it to the cloud, shrink the migration footprint, and cut cost, complexity and timeline all at once. If I were running Solix’s SAP go-to-market, I would not change this pitch. I would change how loudly and how often it gets made, and to whom. More on that later.
I’d expect a smart CIO to push back here and ask why they wouldn’t just dump the historical data into Snowflake or Databricks and call it done. It’s a fair question, and the honest answer is that those platforms solve a different problem.
Snowflake and Databricks are built for analytical consumption, structured for querying at scale, optimized for feeding dashboards and machine learning pipelines. What they are not built for, natively, is SAP’s own retention semantics. An SAP archive object carries legal hold logic, country-specific retention rules, ILM-governed deletion schedules, and the ability to reconstruct a business document exactly as it looked inside the SAP transaction it came from, years after the source system is gone. A generic lakehouse can store the bytes. It cannot, out of the box, guarantee an auditor that a purged record was deleted in line with a retention policy tied to a specific SAP archiving object and a specific regulatory clock.
That distinction sounds like a technicality until you’re the general counsel of a company facing a compliance audit or an eDiscovery request, and someone asks you to prove chain of custody on a decommissioned system. At that point, “we moved it to a data lake” is not an answer. “We moved it into a governed archive purpose-built to preserve SAP’s own retention and access semantics” is. That’s the wedge Solix should be driving, hard, in every conversation, because it’s the one place where the hyperscale data platforms genuinely cannot compete on their own terms.
Here’s where I think Solix should be far more ambitious than its current messaging suggests. An application retirement engagement is, by nature, a low-drama, back-office project. Nobody gets promoted for archiving old purchase orders. But it is also the single best Trojan horse into a much bigger enterprise data relationship.
Once Solix is inside an account, holding the retired, governed, compliant historical record of the enterprise, the natural next conversation is: now that this data is unified and accessible, what else can we do with it? Data governance. Sensitive data discovery and masking for privacy compliance. Feeding a genuinely AI-ready data fabric instead of a swamp of undocumented legacy tables. Solix already has products in this direction, Enterprise Content Services, Enterprise Data Governance, and their own Enterprise AI layer sitting on top of the Common Data Platform. The archiving engagement is the low-risk entry point. The governance and AI-readiness layer is where the account actually grows.
The mistake would be treating the S/4HANA cycle as a one-time services windfall. The right way to think about it is as thousands of enterprises opening their door for exactly one reason, cost reduction on a forced migration, and Solix having a limited window to prove enough value inside that door to earn a much larger, much stickier data relationship over the following years.
Enterprises don’t buy archiving because it’s elegant. They buy it because the numbers work, and here the numbers genuinely do work in Solix’s favour. A smaller migration footprint means a shorter, cheaper migration project. Fewer TB in HANA means lower ongoing infrastructure and licensing cost, every single month, for as long as the system runs. Retiring legacy applications outright removes maintenance, support and licensing spend on systems that exist purely to give someone occasional read access to old records, replacing an ongoing cost with a low, fixed archiving fee. And a properly governed archive removes compliance risk that, left unmanaged, shows up eventually as an audit finding or a legal exposure nobody budgeted for.
Stack those four together and you have a genuinely defensible ROI story that doesn’t need embellishment. That’s rare in enterprise software pitches. Use it.
I looked at several market sizing reports for structured data archiving and application retirement software, and I’ll be direct with you, they disagree with each other by an order of magnitude, some pegging the category at under a hundred million dollars globally, others at close to nine billion. That spread itself tells you something useful: this is still an immature, loosely defined category, which is actually good news for a specialist willing to define it clearly for buyers rather than bad news.
Let me build my own back of envelope instead of borrowing someone else’s number. Take the pool of roughly 17,000 to 20,000 SAP ECC customers who still need to migrate before the 2027 to 2030 window closes. Assume a meaningful minority, say 25 to 30%, have legacy databases large and old enough that a pre-migration archiving and retirement engagement is genuinely worth doing, rather than a nice-to-have. That’s somewhere between 4,000 and 6,000 realistic target accounts globally over the next four to five years. Price a typical engagement, software plus services plus the ongoing archive subscription, anywhere from $150,000 to over a million dollars depending on enterprise size. That puts a realistic, serviceable addressable opportunity for SAP-linked archiving and retirement work somewhere in the low single-digit billions of dollars, cumulative, over this cycle. Not the total category TAM you’ll find quoted in a vendor report, but the actual pool of accounts with a genuine, time-boxed reason to buy.
Solix’s own reported revenue is in the range of $7 million, on a base of around 585 to 594 employees. Set that against a multi-billion dollar addressable pool and the gap is not subtle. This is not a company that is short of opportunity. It is a company that has captured a rounding error of the opportunity in front of it.
Let’s put a number on the upside, because I think this is where the opportunity really comes alive.
Take the low single-digit billions cumulative SAM I built above, call it $3 billion over the next four to five years as a round working number, sitting between my own conservative build and the more optimistic estimates floating around. Now ask a much less ambitious question than “can Solix dominate this market.” Ask: what happens if Solix simply captures 3 to 5% of it, nothing heroic, just a credible, well-executed share for a focused specialist going up against much larger incumbents.
Three percent of $3 billion is $90 million, cumulative, over four to five years. Spread that out, and you’re looking at an incremental $15 to 20 million a year layered on top of their existing $7 million base. That alone doubles or triples current revenue. At 5% capture, you’re at $150 million cumulative, roughly $30 million a year in new SAP-linked revenue, which puts Solix at four to five times its current size purely from this one cycle, before counting a single dollar of expansion revenue from governance, masking or Enterprise AI once they’re inside the account.
This is the part I want to underline. Solix does not need to win this market to be transformed by it. It needs to win a small, defensible slice of it, with discipline, and the company changes shape entirely. That is a far more achievable goal than the market-share fantasies most vendors chase, and it should be the number the leadership team is actually managing towards, quarter by quarter, account by account.
OpenText is the incumbent here, and it earns that position honestly, deep, certified integration with SAP ArchiveLink and ILM, decades of enterprise content management pedigree, and the comfort of being SAP’s own recommended archiving and document access partner. If a CIO wants the safest, most conventional choice, OpenText is it, and Solix should never pretend otherwise.
But “safest and most conventional” is also OpenText’s weakness. It’s a large, broad ECM platform where SAP archiving is one product line among many, built for the customer who wants everything from one vendor and is willing to pay for that convenience and that complexity. Solix’s honest USP is focus and speed: a company whose entire founding purpose, since 2002, has been enterprise data lifecycle management, purpose-built for this exact use case, without the weight of a sprawling content management suite around it. That should translate into faster deployment, a simpler commercial model, and pricing that doesn’t carry OpenText’s platform overhead.
Whether it actually does translate into that, in practice, on a real deal, is a different question, and it’s one Solix needs to be able to prove with hard numbers, not adjectives, in front of every CIO who defaults to “let’s just ask our SAP account rep who they recommend.”
Before any of this legacy SAP data becomes fuel for AI, it has to move through a sequence: classify it, clean it, archive it, govern it, secure it, integrate it, analyse it, and only then apply AI to it. Solix’s strongest, most defensible position is squarely in the middle of that chain, archive, govern and secure. Their retirement and archiving products do that work today, at genuine depth, for SAP-specific data structures that generic platforms don’t understand out of the box.
Where I’d push them to be honest with themselves is the two ends of that chain. Classification and cleaning, the unglamorous front-end work of figuring out what data actually matters before you archive it, and analysis plus AI application, the glamorous back-end work everyone wants to talk about, are both areas where Solix has product ambition (their Enterprise AI and Common Data Platform pushes are clearly aimed there) but not yet the market credibility that IBM, Databricks or Snowflake carry in AI conversations. The right strategic posture is not to pretend Solix is an end-to-end AI platform. It’s to own the archive-govern-secure middle with total authority, and partner or integrate outward at both ends rather than trying to out-market companies with ten times the AI mindshare.
A few things need saying plainly, because a company this size, chasing a cycle this large, cannot afford polite silence about its own gaps.
Solix is unfunded and has stayed that way since 2002. That’s either admirable discipline or a structural constraint on how fast they can scale sales and marketing to meet a decade-scale opportunity, and honestly it’s probably both. A ~$7 million revenue base against 585-plus employees, most of the headcount concentrated in India through what looks like a services and delivery-heavy model, tells me this is a company organised more for cost-efficient execution than for aggressive market capture. Their competitive set, per their own positioning, includes IBM, OpenText, Veritas, Commvault, Informatica and Precisely, tier-one vendors with sales and marketing budgets that dwarf Solix’s entire revenue. Product depth alone does not close that gap.
I think that’s exactly Solix’s risk right now. The technology is genuinely differentiated for this specific moment in SAP’s history. The economics of the pitch are sound. The timing could not be more favourable, a hard deadline, a forced budget conversation, a CFO already primed to ask why the migration bill is so large. The upside math above is real, not aspirational marketing copy.
None of that matters if the sales motion stays where it currently appears to be, largely inbound, largely content-marketing-led, competing for attention against vendors ten times its size. The best product in the world, sitting quietly on a website waiting to be discovered, loses every single time to a mediocre product with a sales team already in the room. Winning this cycle needs an aggressive, account-based push directly at the 4,000 to 6,000 realistic target enterprises I estimated above, a serious channel and system integrator strategy so Solix rides alongside Accenture, Deloitte, TCS and the other large SI’s who are already inside these accounts running the migration, rather than trying to get discovered independently, and marketing that states the ROI and upside case in numbers a CFO and a board can defend, not adjectives a marketer likes.
The window here is not permanent. By 2030, most of this cycle will have played out, one way or another, for most of these 17,000 to 20,000 accounts. The company that wins isn’t necessarily the one with the best archive engine. It’s the one whose sales team is already in the room, with the CFO, before the CIO has finished writing the migration business case. Solix has the product to earn that seat, and it has a genuinely transformative revenue outcome waiting on the other side of even modest execution. Whether it earns that seat is now entirely a go-to-market question, not a technology question.
If you’re sitting inside Solix, inside a CIO’s office staring down this exact 2027 clock, or you think I’ve got a number wrong somewhere in this piece, I want to hear it. Argue with the math in the comments, or write to me directly. This is exactly the kind of conversation that’s more useful out in the open, before the decisions get made behind closed doors.
Disclosure: I hold shares in TechNVision Ventures, Solix’s parent company.
On the 2nd of January 1988, India beat the West Indies in a one-day international at Eden Gardens for the first time ever on Indian soil. I was there. I was twelve, and I still count it among the best days of my childhood.
But this isn’t a story about the match. It’s a story about my father, and a ticket, and something he understood about panic that took me about thirty years to properly learn.
Let me set it up.
My uncle had managed to get three tickets. One each for me and my two cousins. My father didn’t have one. Getting tickets for a game like that was hard in those days, and there simply wasn’t a fourth.
When we reached the ground it was already packed, and outside the gates there were touts selling tickets at wild prices. My father looked at what they were asking and showed no interest at all. He walked us to the gate, sent the three of us in, and I assumed he was going home.
He didn’t go home.
I only found this out afterwards. He hadn’t gone anywhere. He’d stayed near the gate, and he’d kept one particular tout in the corner of his eye. His reasoning was simple. The moment the match starts, a man holding unsold tickets stops holding an asset and starts holding a problem. Nobody wants a ticket to a game that has already begun.
So he waited. The match started. And exactly as he’d predicted, the tout began to panic, because every passing minute made those tickets worth less. My father let him sweat. Then he walked over and bought his way in for ten rupees over the printed price, roughly 45 minutes after the first ball.
He watched most of the match. He paid almost nothing. And he taught me something without saying a word about it.
Here’s the sentence I wrote about him years later, in my first book. Patience was his virtue.
Now here’s the part I actually want to talk about, because it took me most of my career to connect it to my working life.
My father wasn’t being cheap. He could have bought a tout’s ticket at the inflated price and walked in with us. What he refused to pay wasn’t the money. It was the price of panic. The premium that a seller charges you precisely when you feel you have to decide right now.
Once you start noticing that premium, you see it everywhere.
You see it when you shop online and the site tells you there are “only 3 left” and “12 people are viewing this”. None of that is there to inform you. It’s there to switch off the patient part of your brain and switch on the part that grabs. It’s the tout’s stall, rebuilt in software, and it works on most of us most of the time.
And here is where it stops being a shopping story and starts being about the thing I actually do for a living.
Legacy modernization is sold to you with exactly the same stall.
If you run engineering or technology at a mid-sized company, you already know the pitch, because some version of it lands in your inbox most months. Your stack is a ticking bomb. Your competitors are already AI-native and pulling away. Every month you wait, the migration gets more expensive and more dangerous. Sign now. Start now. There’s no time to assess.
It is the tout, holding a ticket, telling you the match is about to start.
And I want to be honest with you, because I’m in this industry and I benefit from your urgency. Some of that pitch is even true. Some legacy systems genuinely are a growing risk. Some competitors genuinely are moving faster. The urgency isn’t always manufactured.
But notice what the pitch always needs you to skip.
It needs you to skip the assessment.
Because the assessment is the one thing that tells you how much of the panic is real. It’s where you find out whether your system needs a full rebuild or a careful refactor. It’s where you find out which parts of it are genuinely holding you back and which parts are fine and just old. It’s where you often find out that the AI capability you’re being sold can’t even run on your data yet, so the real first job is smaller and cheaper than the thing in the proposal.
A seller who is confident in the work wants you to assess first, because the assessment qualifies the job.
A seller who is selling you panic needs you not to, because the assessment is where the panic evaporates.
My father’s move at that gate wasn’t to refuse the ticket. He wanted to watch the match as much as I did. His move was to refuse the price of the ticket while the seller was using urgency to inflate it. He separated the thing he wanted from the pressure he was being sold, and he waited for the pressure to burn off.
That is exactly what a scoped assessment is, in our world. It is not saying no to modernization. It is saying: I’ll find out where I actually stand before I commit to anything, and I’ll make the big decision from knowledge instead of from fear.
You walk out of it with a roadmap and a business case. Then, and only then, you decide how big the job is. Sometimes it’s the full rebuild after all. Often it’s a great deal less than you were about to sign for.
So if there’s a modernization decision in front of you right now, and it comes wrapped in urgency, ask yourself my father’s question before you reach for your wallet.
Is the match really about to start? Or is somebody just holding a ticket they need me to buy in a hurry?
You can find out. That’s what an assessment is for. It costs you a fraction of the decision it protects, and it turns a leap of faith into a piece of arithmetic.
Be a buyer or be a seller. You only really win when you have the patience to find out what something is actually worth.
If you’d like us to look at where your systems actually stand before you commit to anything, that’s precisely what our Modernization and AI Readiness Assessment is for. It’s scoped, it’s fast, and it ends with a roadmap and a business case you own, whatever you decide to do next.
Last week I gave a talk to a hall full of computer science students at Brainware University, and I opened it by telling them that most of what their degree is optimised for is getting cheaper by the month. Not the obvious way to begin a talk you have been invited to give, I know. But I did not travel there to reassure anyone, and reassurance is not what that generation needs from people my age.
I want to set out here the argument I made to them, because it is not really an argument about students. It is about all of us who work in and around technology, and it is about a shift I think we are collectively misreading.
The thing that first made me sit up was not a headline or a research report. It was my own P&L.
A few years ago we built a document processing system for a client. Four engineers, eleven weeks. Recently another client asked us for something functionally similar. Two engineers, under three weeks. Same company, better engineers, higher salaries, and a smaller invoice at the end of it.
Sit with that for a second, because the interesting part is not the speed. The interesting part is that the client did not get poorer and we did not get worse. What happened is that the price of writing software fell, and it fell faster than anyone in my industry has been willing to admit out loud.
I have spent twenty-seven years in sales. My whole working life has been spent watching what people are willing to pay for, and watching that list quietly change underneath everyone. And I will tell you, as the person who reads the bank statement on a Monday morning, that the list is changing right now faster than at any point since I started.
So the question I put to the students that afternoon is the one I want to put to you. It is not “will AI take my job.” That question is beneath all of us and it leads nowhere useful. The real question is this. When the making of software gets cheap, what gets expensive? Because whatever gets expensive is where you want to be standing three years from now.
For most of my career, in this industry and in this city especially, the bottleneck was hands. If you wanted more software, you hired more engineers. That was the entire model of the Indian IT industry for thirty years. Bodies in, billing out. It was a good model and it made this country a great deal of money, and I have nothing but respect for what it built.
But when your bottleneck is hands, whoever can supply hands wins. And the bottleneck is no longer hands.
I told the students I have watched this happen four times before, which is why I am not panicking and why they should not either. The internet arrived and the bottleneck moved from distribution to attention. Offshoring matured and it moved from cost to coordination. Cloud arrived and it moved from infrastructure to architecture. Mobile arrived and it moved back to attention, sharper this time. And now AI arrives, and the bottleneck moves from production to judgment.
Every single time, the same thing happened. The people who mourned the old bottleneck lost. The people who ran at the new one won. And here is the part worth noticing, the part I lingered on with them. In every case the new bottleneck was less technical than the old one, not more. That should tell us something about where this is heading, and it is not where most of the anxious commentary assumes.
I spend a fair amount of my time reading annual reports, because I research and invest in small companies, and you develop a nose for the gap between what a firm says it is doing and what it is actually shipping. On the subject of digital transformation, that gap is enormous. Most of these programmes fail, and almost none of them fail for the reason people expect.
They do not fail because the technology did not work. They fail for reasons that have nothing to do with code, and this was the part of the talk I asked the students to pay the most attention to, because their syllabus will never cover it.
They fail because a proof of concept has no owner, no budget line, and nobody whose promotion depends on it, so it sits in a demo folder forever. A demo, I have learned the hard way, is not a product. A demo is a request for permission.
They fail because the organisation’s data is a disgrace, and AI is a magnifier. Point it at a mess and you get a faster, more confident mess.
They fail because the people running the programme measure themselves on uptime and accuracy, while the person who actually decides whether it lives measures herself on revenue, and nobody has ever shown her the connection between the two.
And they fail because the org chart eats the idea. The new system quietly makes someone’s job disappear, and that someone has been at the company nineteen years and knows exactly which meetings to be unhelpful in. I do not blame them. They are protecting their families. But if you design a transformation that asks people to volunteer for their own obsolescence, you have not designed a transformation. You have designed a conflict.
I told the students this next part on myself, because I think you earn the right to diagnose failure only after you have admitted your own. A while back we tried to move Brainium from a services business toward more platform work, and we picked an open source ERP as our way in. Sensible plan. We ran the pilot on ourselves first and gave every department a month to adopt it. Every department did, eventually, except one. Six months in, our accounts team still had not moved. They were happy with what they had and saw no reason to change. In the end we scrapped the whole programme.
Notice what failed there. Not the software. We had no vendor problem, no integration problem, no budget problem. We had one team that saw no reason to change, and this was inside my own company, where I could in theory just give the instruction. Now imagine that same dynamic inside a client with four thousand employees. Technology fails last. It fails only after ownership, data, incentives and politics have already failed, and then it takes the blame for all of them.
The phrase everyone reaches for is “ahead of the curve,” and most people use it to mean adopting new tools early. I think that is close to worthless. I know people who have tried every new AI tool within a week of launch for three years running and are no better off for it. Early adoption of tools is a hobby, not a strategy.
Being ahead of the curve means being positioned where value is going to accumulate, before it accumulates there, and staying put while it does. That is a positioning question, not a tooling question. And here is the uncomfortable part I made the students sit with. The curve is an adoption curve, which by definition means most people are on the wrong part of it, which means being genuinely ahead of it will feel wrong. It will feel like you are working on something slightly embarrassing that your friends do not understand yet. If it feels comfortable and validated, you are not ahead. You are in the middle.
So what actually gets precious as the making gets cheap? I gave them a few candidates, and I stand behind each of them here.
Taste, for one. When you can generate a hundred options in an hour, the scarce act is choosing. The ability to look at eight plausible outputs and know which one is right, and say why, is now worth more than the ability to produce any single one of them. Taste has quietly become a technical skill.
Accountability, for another. Somebody has to sign. When a system makes a decision that harms a customer, “the model did it” is not an answer that survives a regulator, a court, or a board. The person who can put their name under a system’s behaviour and defend it becomes structurally valuable, and that role cannot be automated, because the whole point of it is that a human is liable.
And deep domain knowledge. Not general knowledge, which is now abundant and nearly free. The specific, ugly, hard-won knowledge of how one industry actually works. How a jeweller really hedges gold. How a hospital actually schedules a theatre, as opposed to how the manual says it does. That knowledge lives in people’s heads and in badly written internal documents, and it is the last mile, and the last mile is where the money has always been.
I closed the talk with the honest version of career advice. Ship something real to a stranger, not another college project. Pick one industry and learn how the money moves in it. Learn to write, because muddled thinking now scales into confident nonsense at machine speed. Learn to say what your work does to someone’s number. And do not wait for clarity, because there is no year in which this becomes settled and calm. Every senior person you meet is also improvising. The ones who look composed have simply been improvising for longer.
Then something happened that was not in my notes, and it has stayed with me more than anything I said from the stage.
After the talk, a small group of students came up to me. Not the software engineering crowd, as I might have expected. The cybersecurity students. They wanted to talk about their career path specifically, where to point themselves, what was worth betting on.
I had spent a line or two during the talk telling that particular group that the attack surface is now expanding faster than any defence budget, because every organisation is shipping systems it does not fully understand, built partly with tools it does not fully control, on data it cannot fully account for. I had framed it as an opportunity rather than a crisis. And here they were, the ones who had heard that as an invitation rather than a threat.
That is the whole argument, and it walked up to me in a corridor. The people who will do well are not the ones waiting to be told their field is safe. They are the ones who hear “this is unstable and nobody has it figured out” and lean toward it instead of away.
So let me put the argument to you plainly, now that the students have gone home. AI has collapsed the cost of producing things. It has not touched the cost of knowing what is worth producing, and it has arguably raised it. Our education, and frankly a good deal of our industry, is still built almost entirely around the half that got cheap. The other half, judgment, domain depth, the nerve to own a decision, nobody is going to hand to us. But nobody is stopping us from building it either, and that is a far better position than most generations have been handed.
The students who walked up to me afterwards already understood that. I suspect they will be fine.
There are people who tell you their story and there are people who let you sit inside it. Siddhartha Bose is the second kind.
We met over coffee, which is the only correct way to meet him. The man loves his coffee the way some people love their first car. He holds the cup, he settles into the chair, and then the stories start coming. Not the polished conference-stage versions. The real ones, with the dates slightly worn at the edges and the pain still intact in the middle.
I’ll be honest about something before I go further. Before I sat down to write this, I was carrying a half-remembered version of his story in my head. I had the name of his first restaurant wrong. I had the number of outlets wrong. I had the years jumbled. It took some digging, and it took listening to him properly, to get the story straight. So what follows is the straightened version, and frankly it’s better than the one I was carrying.
Siddhartha Bose graduated from St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata, in 1982, cut his teeth at a shipping company, and then spent seventeen years in administration with the Tata Group.
Now here’s the thing about administration in a house like the Tatas. It’s not a department. It’s a finishing school for judgement. You learn how organisations actually run, not how they say they run. You learn people. You learn detail. You learn that the small things are the big things wearing a disguise.
He told me two stories from his working years and I haven’t been able to shake either of them.
The first one goes back further than Tata, to his very first job, with a shipping company. Picture a rookie, barely out of college, and a problem nobody wanted: a Greek cargo ship stranded in Kolkata, bleeding port dues, needing to be sold off as scrap so the money could be recovered. His employers didn’t hand it to a veteran. They handed it to him, put him on a train to Mumbai, and he stayed there for weeks finding a way through. The deal was eventually worked out with Seahorse Shipping & Ship Management, a company that counted Amitabh Bachchan among its investors. A first-job kid, a stranded Greek freighter, and the Big B’s shipping outfit closing the loop. You couldn’t script it.
What stayed with him from that episode wasn’t the deal. It was the trust. Somebody senior looked at a rookie and handed him the wheel before he’d earned the certainty. I’ve spent my life building businesses and I can tell you that is the single rarest thing in corporate life. Most organisations give you responsibility only after you’ve proven you don’t need the growth it would give you. The good ones bet on you slightly before the evidence is in. That first bet, made on a young man with a stranded ship, is quietly present in everything he built afterwards.
The second story comes from the Tata years. A group of candidates came in for interviews, and his boss gave him an instruction that no HR manual would ever print. Take them out for lunch. Watch how they handle the table. The ones with proper table etiquette, call them for the next round.
Sit with that for a moment. Long before anyone was writing LinkedIn posts about “hiring for culture fit,” a Tata manager in Calcutta had understood that how a person treats a fork, a waiter and a shared table tells you more about them than an hour of rehearsed answers. Etiquette isn’t snobbery in that framework. It’s evidence. It shows whether a person notices the people around them.
Around the turn of the millennium, after seventeen years, he left. And he didn’t leave to do something safe.
In 2000 he launched Jewel of the East at 6 Loudon Street, and walking in beside him was Rajeev Neogi, the partner whose name will keep returning in this story, because the two of them have travelled the entire hospitality road together from that first day. If you know Kolkata, you know what that address meant. This wasn’t a canteen with ambition. It was an upscale, multicuisine destination, two to three cuisines under one roof, coastal among them, playing in the same league as the city’s most premium names. The old restaurant directories of that era list it in the upmarket tier alongside Zaranj and Blue Fox, which tells you exactly where they had aimed.
Upscale restaurants are capital-intensive today. In the Kolkata of 2000 they were brutally so. Imported fittings, serious kitchens, trained staff, a premium lease. A man who had drawn a Tata salary for seventeen years put his chips on the finest table in town.
And then the floor gave way, and not for any of the reasons the business books warn you about.
The food wasn’t the problem. The customers weren’t the problem. The problem was a signature. He had taken the premises on lease from a man he didn’t background-check. It later emerged that the property belonged to someone else entirely. The rightful owner went to court, and the matter went all the way to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court granted an eviction order.
Just like that, the finest multicuisine setup in the city had no address. Everything sunk into that space, the fit-out, the kitchen, the brand he was building around a location, stood on land he never truly had.
He described that period to me plainly. It was a terrible time. A good life became a very average life almost overnight. And to be fair, that’s the sanitised summary of what it must actually have felt like, because upscale F&B doesn’t fail politely. It fails with creditors, with staff you can’t pay, with a city that watches.
Now here’s the thing I want every founder reading this to sit with. Jewel of the East wasn’t killed by the market. It was killed by a due diligence gap. One unverified counterparty. As an entrepreneur I have watched more businesses die of paperwork than of competition, and this story is the sharpest version of that truth I have ever heard from someone who lived it.
He didn’t stop, though. Even in that stretch he set up Porto Rio, which he’ll tell you was the first dedicated Indian coastal cuisine restaurant in Kolkata, and he took on the revival of a lounge bar in the heart of the city. The instinct to build didn’t die on Loudon Street. Only the illusion that a premium address is the same thing as a foundation.
What happened next is the part of the story Kolkata knows, though almost nobody knows it as an answer to what came before.
In March 2003, with a starting stake of twenty-five thousand rupees per partner and everything Loudon Street had taught him, Bose and his friends took over a struggling little Chinese restaurant running out of a garage space in Ekdalia. About a hundred and eighty square feet. A family who needed a way out, a man who needed a way back in.
And here I have to correct myself in public, because when Siddhartha Da read an early version of this piece, this is the part he pushed back on. I had framed the rebuild as essentially his. He wouldn’t accept it. Nothing of what I’ve been has ever been alone, he told me. I always made sure I belonged to a team. Not every subject is anyone’s forte, and everyone in the group contributed something vital. Then he named the name he insisted must be mentioned: Rajeev Neogi, the partner who had walked with him from the first day at Jewel of the East, through Porto Rio, and into the garage at Ekdalia. Frankly, the correction tells you more about the man than any anecdote I could write. Most founders quietly enjoy being made the hero of the story. This one read a flattering draft and asked for the credit to be shared.
Look at the architecture of that decision against the wreckage of the previous one. No premium address. No stranger’s lease. A takeover from a family who wanted the deal, not a signature from a man nobody had checked. Minimum capital, so no single failure could take anyone down. The model built on the old Kolkata pice hotel, honest home-style food at honest prices, rather than on imported chandeliers. Every single choice was the inverse of Jewel of the East. People call Bhojohori Manna a comeback. I’d call it something more precise. It was a correction. They rebuilt around the exact wound.
The name came from the Manna Dey song, “Ami Sri Sri Bhojohori Manna,” the one about the wandering cook who returns home with a style all his own. You could not invent a more fitting name for what they were actually doing.
It started by selling fish fry and cutlets. Within weeks the demand for proper home-style Bengali food pushed them into main courses, and that tiny kitchen quietly turned into a base kitchen, a hub feeding what would become the spokes. By May 2003, two months in, there were crowds waiting outside the garage on weekends. Kolkata had been starving for its own food served without apology, and nobody had noticed until a team with no formal F&B training served it.
From there the story compounds. Across Kolkata first. Then Bangalore in July 2008, of all times, right into the teeth of a global recession, because homesick Bengalis in Koramangala don’t check the Sensex before craving kosha mangsho. Then Mumbai, Siliguri, Puri. A partnership became a private limited company in 2009 and then a public limited one. The brand fed film stars and politicians and the working middle class at adjacent tables, which in Kolkata is the truest certificate of arrival.
My favourite proof of what the brand became isn’t a revenue number. In 2017, when FIFA’s international delegates came to the refurbished Salt Lake Stadium ahead of the Under-17 World Cup, it was Bhojohori Manna that laid out the classic Bengali feast for them, and the word that came back was that delegates from seventy-odd countries loved it. A garage in Ekdalia to FIFA’s table in fourteen years.
And here’s where my own story quietly folds into his. When it comes to World Cup football I’ve always been a France man. When France lifted the cup in 2018, my college mates came collecting the treat I owed them, and I didn’t have to think for even a second about the venue. Bhojohori Manna, Esplanade. Where else does a Kolkata boy celebrate a World Cup? What I didn’t know that evening, passing plates around a loud and happy table, was that eight years later, in 2026, I’d be sitting across from the man who started it all, coffee going warm between us, listening to how the whole thing was built. Life folds itself in strange and generous ways sometimes.
And Bose’s fingerprints are all over the machinery underneath the nostalgia. The administration. The sales and marketing. The customer relationship systems. The in-house training and front office teams. The home delivery operation across every unit, set up long before delivery apps made it table stakes. The outdoor catering business with its corporate and celebrity client list. The relationships with media and the F&B community that kept the brand warm in the city’s imagination for two decades. I notice these things because I’ve built businesses myself. Everybody sees the daab chingri. A founder sees the CRM behind it.
Along the way he also co-founded Machhli Baba Fries, judged a regional Shark Tank style show on Hotstar, and in 2023 joined the National Restaurant Association of India as a mentor. The man collects second acts the way the rest of us collect excuses.
Less than a year ago, Siddhartha Bose sold Bhojohori Manna. The next generation wasn’t ready to carry the business, and rather than let a beloved brand drift, he let it pass into new hands. That takes a clarity most founders never find. Plenty of Indian family businesses have been slowly strangled by the sentiment that selling is defeat.
Some time after the sale, I noticed his LinkedIn described him as the ex-founder of Bhojohori Manna. I told him to change it, and I’ll tell you what I told him.
Ownership is a transaction. Founding is history. You can sell shares. You cannot sell the fact that in March 2003 you stood in a garage in Ekdalia and started something. Nobody says Phil Knight is the ex-founder of Nike. The brand may belong to someone else now. The founding belongs to him forever.
He changed it. Founder of Bhojohori Manna. As it should read till the end of time.
So what does a man do after Tata, after Loudon Street, after building and selling the most loved Bengali food brand of his generation?
He orders another coffee and starts again.
Today he runs Globe & Garnish, an F&B consulting practice where he advises entrepreneurs setting up cafes and restaurants. Project setups, kitchens, interiors, operations, the works, drawn from more than two decades of doing it with his own money on the line.
And I want you to see the poetry in this, because it’s the reason I wrote this piece. The man who once signed a lease without checking who really owned the building now spends his days making sure young founders never make that mistake, or the hundred quieter ones that follow it. His scar tissue has become other people’s syllabus. That is the best possible use of a wound.
When we meet, he doesn’t lead with the triumphs. He leads with the stories, the stranded Greek ship, the Tata lunches, the garage, the queues, and he tells them with warmth rather than bitterness, including the ones that cost him everything. Years of building businesses have taught me to read people quickly, and here’s my honest read. Siddhartha Bose is a lovely human being who happens to have built great businesses, and not the other way around. In this industry, in any industry, that ordering is rarer than the success.
Somewhere in Kolkata right now, a first-time cafe founder is sitting across a table from him, coffee going cold, listening to a story about a building on Loudon Street. If that founder is paying attention, they’re receiving twenty-five years of tuition for the price of a cup.
A shipping company once trusted a rookie with a stranded Greek freighter before he believed in himself. He’s spending his fourth act extending that same trust to strangers.
That’s not a career. That’s a life well built.
If you’re an entrepreneur looking to enter the F&B space, Siddhartha Bose consults through Globe & Garnish. Find him on LinkedIn. Order the coffee. Ask about Loudon Street.
It has been a wretched few weeks to be an Indian cricket fan. The kind of stretch where you stop opening the score updates because you already know what they’ll say. And then, right at the bottom of it, a group of women walked out at the home of cricket and reminded me why I keep opening those updates in the first place.
Let me start with the pain, because there was plenty of it.
First it was the women’s T20 World Cup. India went in as one of the favourites and walked out at the group stage, undone by South Africa and then by Australia in the final league game. That last match was at Lord’s, of all places. Harmanpreet Kaur smashed 56 off 27 and dragged India to 170, the highest total anyone had managed against Australia at a women’s T20 World Cup, and it still wasn’t enough. Ellyse Perry and Ash Gardner knocked off 171 without much fuss and knocked India out. Second World Cup running that we didn’t make the knockouts. For a side that lifted the fifty-over World Cup only last November, going home early in the shortest format has become a familiar wound. We are champions over fifty overs and strangers over twenty. That gap refuses to close.
While that was unfolding, the men were away in Ireland and England, and somehow they made the women’s exit look like a good day.
Ireland was meant to be the warm-up. The soft part of the tour. It turned into the opposite. India lost 2-0. Not just a series defeat after a long unbeaten run, but the first time in history that Ireland have beaten India in a T20I series. Debutant seamers most of us had never heard of ran through a batting line-up fresh off the flat, forgiving pitches of the IPL and suddenly clueless on a surface that moved. That was the first crack.
And there was a subplot the media had been building for weeks. Vaibhav Suryavanshi was supposed to be the story of this tour. Fifteen years old, the youngest player ever called up to a senior India side, Orange Cap and MVP at IPL 2026 with 776 runs at a strike rate most players can only dream of. This was billed as his coronation. Instead he carried the drinks through both Ireland games, then carried them through the first England match too, and by the time he finally got his debut at Bristol he lasted 15 off 10 before an Archer bouncer did him in. The most anticipated debutant in years, and India managed to make even that feel like an afterthought.
If Ireland was a crack, England was the collapse. A 4-0 drubbing. It wasn’t 5-0 only because rain washed out the opener, which is a strange thing to feel grateful for. Six completed matches on this tour, six defeats in a row, the longest losing streak the Men in Blue have ever put together in this format. And remember, this is the reigning T20 World Cup side. The same group hailed a few months ago as one of the finest T20 units ever assembled.
The management dropped Suryakumar Yadav, the man who lifted the World Cup, and handed the reins to Shreyas Iyer. Iyer has now won the toss again and again and won nothing else. Not one match under his captaincy. A new captain, a new plan, and a lot of questions that Gautam Gambhir and the selectors are going to have to answer, because you don’t dismantle a world-champion set-up and then lose to Ireland without owing everyone an explanation.
The salt in the wound came the day the England series ended. England climbed to the top of the ICC T20I rankings and pushed India down to second, ending a run at number one that had lasted more than 1,600 days, all the way back to February 2022. We were the best team in the world on paper for four and a half years. We ended this fortnight as the second-best team getting bowled out for 76 at Trent Bridge.
That was the ledger. All red ink. And then eleven women picked up a pen and started writing in a different colour.
Here is the part that gives me goosebumps. The ground where India’s women were knocked out of the World Cup on the 28th of June was Lord’s. And the ground where they made history two weeks later was Lord’s. Same turf. Same dressing room. Same long walk out through the Long Room. The place that broke their hearts became the place where they became immortal.
For the first time ever, a women’s Test match was played at Lord’s. Fifty years, almost to the week, since Rachael Heyhoe Flint first led an England women’s side out at the ground, and it took half a century for the red-ball game to arrive at cricket’s most sacred address. England versus India. Test number 153 in the history of women’s cricket, and the first at the home of the sport.
The mood around India going in was gloomy, and I understood why. After everything the men had served up, and after the women’s own World Cup heartbreak, who was going to back this side? But I’ll be honest, I wasn’t as worried as most. This India team has always been better over the long format than the short one. The last time they played a Test in England, back in 2021, they held on for a draw. I thought they could compete. What I did not expect was that they would not just compete but demolish.
India batted first and put up 285, with Smriti Mandhana anchoring it on 83, Harmanpreet chipping in 58 and Deepti Sharma 57. A good total, not a great one. Then Kranti Gaud took over.
Gaud is 22, she bowls genuine pace, and on the second morning she ran through England’s top order to finish with 5 for 37. When she got her fifth, she became the first woman ever to have her name go up on the Test honours board at Lord’s. Think about that. A century of men’s names on those boards, and a young fast bowler from India got there first for the women. England folded for 170, with only Amy Jones offering resistance.
India could have enforced the follow-on and didn’t need to, because the second innings turned a strong position into an unassailable one. Mandhana made 70 to go with her 83, Richa Ghosh finished unbeaten on 50, and then Yastika Bhatia produced the innings of her life, a century, 113 runs, the first ever Test hundred by a woman at Lord’s. Two Indians on the honours board in the same match, one for the ball and one for the bat, at a ground that had never seen a woman’s name up there before. India declared on 341 for 7 and set England 457 to win.
Four hundred and fifty-seven. On this ground, in the fourth innings, that was never a chase. It was a sentence.
England had one flicker of defiance. Sophie Ecclestone, who had bowled her heart out for a eight-wicket match haul, then went and made a maiden half-century with the bat. A eight-for and a fifty in the same Test, and she still finished on the losing side, which tells you exactly how one-sided this was. On the fourth morning Sneh Rana wrapped it up, four wickets in the innings and six in the match, and India had won by 270 runs inside 95 minutes of play. The fourth-largest victory by runs in the history of women’s Test cricket.
Kranti Gaud took the player of the match award. Mandhana never got on the honours board, but her 83 and 70 were the spine of both innings, and she’ll know how much they mattered.
Where the men were found wanting, the women stood tall. A frustrated fan needed this. I needed this.
So here is where I land after this fortnight. The men have a reckoning coming, and they’ve earned it. You cannot drop a World Cup-winning captain, lose to Ireland, get swept by England, surrender your number one ranking, and expect the questions to go away. They shouldn’t go away. Accountability is the price of wearing that shirt.
But the same country that produced that collapse also produced the group of women who turned the very ground of their World Cup exit into the ground of their greatest triumph. That is the story I’ll remember from these weeks. Not the 76 all out. The 270-run win. Not the ranking we lost. The honours board we finally reached.
The men will get their chance to answer. The women already have.
Way to go, girls. You carried Indian cricket when it needed carrying the most.
Somewhere in Manchester right now, an IT Director is staring at a Gantt chart that ended three months ago. The ERP went live. The consultants held a celebratory call, sent a closure report with a tasteful cover page, and moved on to their next implementation. The system works, technically. And yet her ticket queue has tripled, her two-person IT team is drowning, finance is quietly rebuilding their old spreadsheets on the side, and the board is asking why the system they spent eighteen months and a serious budget on feels harder than what it replaced.
Nobody budgeted for this phase. Almost nobody does.
I have spent thirteen years at Brainium watching this exact movie play out across mid-market companies, most of them in the UK. The plot never changes. The implementation gets all the attention, all the money, all the steering committee meetings. Then go-live happens, the implementation partner’s engagement ends, and the company discovers that an ERP is not a project. It is a living system that needs people to keep it alive. And those people were never hired.
Let me answer the question directly, because if you found this post searching for ERP support outsourcing, you deserve a straight answer before the storytelling. ERP support outsourcing means engaging an external team, typically dedicated engineers who work only on your system, to handle the ongoing work an ERP demands after go-live: bug fixes, integrations, user support, report building, customisation, and the steady stream of change requests that a real business generates. For most mid-market companies, it costs a fraction of building the equivalent in-house team, and it starts delivering in weeks rather than the months a hiring cycle takes.
Now back to our IT Director in Manchester, because her situation explains why this model exists.
The first ninety days after go-live are brutal by design. Users who nodded through training sessions discover they retained nothing. Edge cases the implementation team never encountered start appearing daily. That integration with the warehouse system that “worked in testing” chokes on real volumes. Month-end close, the true stress test of any ERP, exposes configuration decisions that seemed sensible in a workshop and are catastrophic in practice.
Industry analysts have been saying for years that a majority of ERP implementations fail to deliver expected value, and in my experience the failure rarely happens during implementation. It happens in the twelve months after, when there is nobody left to adapt the system to the business. The consultants are gone. The internal team knows how to reset passwords, not how to rewrite a posting rule.
The obvious answer is to hire. Every IT Director I speak to has tried, or has done the spreadsheet and given up before trying.
An experienced ERP specialist in the UK, someone who genuinely understands both the platform and the business processes it encodes, commands a serious salary. You need at least two, because one person is a resignation letter away from disaster. Add recruitment costs, benefits, and the six months it takes them to learn your specific configuration. You are now looking at a standing annual commitment that most mid-market budgets simply cannot absorb for what the board sees as “keeping the lights on.”
So companies compromise. They stretch the existing team, which burns people out. They buy a support contract from the ERP vendor, which gets them a ticketing portal and a service level agreement that measures response time, not resolution. Or they call the original implementation partner back at day rates that make the CFO’s eye twitch, for work that is fundamentally unpredictable in volume.
None of these are people. They are all, in different disguises, more software and more paperwork wrapped around the absence of people.
The model I have watched work, and the one we have built Brainium’s ERP support practice around, is dedicated hiring. Not a helpdesk. Not a pool of anonymous engineers who pick your ticket off a queue. A named engineer, or a small named team, who work exclusively on your system, attend your standups, know that Sandra in finance always means the aged debtors report when she says “the report,” and accumulate the same institutional knowledge an employee would.
The economics work because of geography. A dedicated ERP engineer working from our Kolkata team costs a UK company a fraction of the equivalent local hire, without the compromise on capability that offshore work had a reputation for fifteen years ago. The talent pipeline here for ERP platforms, integrations, and the surrounding stack is deep and getting deeper. What the client buys is not cheap labour. It is the ability to afford continuity, which is the one thing an ERP actually needs and the one thing every alternative model fails to provide.
The difference shows up in the texture of the work. A ticket-based support contract fixes what breaks. A dedicated engineer notices that the same category of thing keeps breaking and fixes the cause. A day-rate consultant answers the question you asked. A dedicated team member answers the question you should have asked, because they were in the room when the problem first surfaced. Over a year, that compounding knowledge is the gap between an ERP that slowly ossifies and one that keeps pace with the business.
If you are an IT Director evaluating ERP support outsourcing, here is the filter I would apply, and I say this knowing it cuts against some of our own competitors’ models. Ask one question: will I know the names of the people working on my system, and will those names be the same in six months?
If the answer is a rota, a queue, or a vague assurance about “our team,” you are buying a service level agreement, not capacity. SLAs are fine for infrastructure. ERPs are not infrastructure. They are the digitised nervous system of your business, and nervous systems need people who know them, not people who can look them up.
The post-go-live crisis is not a sign your implementation failed. It is a sign your ERP is being used, stress-tested by reality, and asked to change. That is exactly what you paid for. The only failure is meeting that moment with a support portal when what the moment demands is people.
Our IT Director in Manchester, by the way, is a composite. But the pattern is drawn from real engagements, and if her Gantt chart looks like yours, the fix is not another module or another licence. It is two or three good engineers who wake up every day thinking about your system. That is what we build at Brainium: dedicated ERP support teams for mid-market companies who need the people their budget could never hire locally. If that gap sounds familiar, let’s talk before month-end close does the talking for you.
A retail founder once told me his app team and his ERP team hadn’t spoken to each other in four months. Not because of a conflict. Because nobody’s job was to make them.
I remember sitting across from him and almost missing the whole point.
He’d called me in because he wanted to talk about replatforming his storefront. New frontend, new checkout, the works. I had a proposal half-written in my head before he finished his second sentence. That’s the trap in this business. Someone says “we need a new app” and you start estimating instead of asking why.
I caught myself and asked one question instead: “When a customer’s order moves from your storefront to your warehouse system, what happens?”
He didn’t know. Not vaguely. Completely didn’t know. He called in his ops lead, who didn’t know either, and then his app lead, who also didn’t know. Three people in the room, each one responsible for a piece of the business, and not one of them could tell me whether an order placed on the app actually landed correctly in the system that was supposed to fulfill it.
That’s the moment I stopped talking about a storefront redesign.
Two teams, two roadmaps, two definitions of done
Here’s the pattern, and once you see it you’ll notice it everywhere in retail. One team owns the ERP or the warehouse system. Another team owns the app or the storefront. Both teams have sprint boards. Both teams ship on schedule. Both teams can show you a demo that works.
And the customer still feels like they’re dealing with two different companies.
Nobody planned it this way. Nobody sat down and decided to split the business into two disconnected projects. It happens because budgets get approved separately, teams get hired separately, and “done” gets defined separately. The app team’s definition of done is a feature that works in the app. The ERP team’s definition of done is a ticket that’s closed. Neither definition includes the question that actually matters to the person paying for the product: does my order, my loyalty points, my return, follow me correctly from one system to the other?
I’ve now watched this play out in warehouses and I’ve watched it play out in loyalty apps, in industries that have nothing else in common.
We spent close to two years embedded inside a UAE retail and sports group’s SAP EWM operations. Real problems, the unglamorous kind: putaway logic failing on multi-floor bin selection, near-expiry stock not routing to the right storage, manual pick-pack steps that should have been automatic years earlier. None of that was an app problem or a storefront problem. It was the back office quietly falling behind the pace the front end had already set, and nobody owning the gap between the two.
Around the same time, we built a loyalty app for a UK pet retail brand where the problem looked completely different on the surface. Hundreds of stores, a punch-card loyalty scheme, and a customer who could not be recognised the same way twice. Walk into the store, you’re a stranger. Open the app, you’re a different stranger. The fix wasn’t a smarter app. It was building the connective layer so the till and the app finally agreed on who the customer was.
Different tech stacks. Different countries. Same root cause both times: two systems that each worked fine on their own and had never been asked to work together.
My time in this industry has taught me that the fastest way to waste a client’s money is to answer the question they asked instead of the one they should have asked. Early in my career I pitched a full platform rebuild to a client because that’s what he requested in the first meeting. Four weeks in, I found out his real problem wasn’t the platform. It was two internal teams that had stopped talking after a reorg. I had to go back and tell him the proposal was wrong. Uncomfortable conversation. The right one to have.
So now I ask this before I let anyone talk about a redesign, a migration, or a rebuild:
When something crosses from one of your systems to another, does it happen automatically, or does someone have to notice it’s broken first?
If the answer takes more than a few seconds, or if it takes three people in the room to even attempt an answer, that’s the real project. Not the frontend. Not the backend. The handoff between them.
You don’t need a new platform to start fixing this. You need a name.
Pick the one handoff in your business where a customer’s order, points, return, or history moves from one system to another. Ask whoever’s closest to it what happens when that handoff breaks. If you get a shrug, or three different answers from three different people, you’ve found your actual bottleneck, and it was hiding behind whichever team asked for budget first.
Fund that conversation before you fund either team’s next roadmap. It’s cheaper, and it’s the fix that actually reaches the customer.
If you’re looking at a similar gap in your own stack, a conversation with Brainium’s engineering team costs nothing and might save you the four weeks it took me to learn this the hard way.
Today, June 24, Lionel Messi turns 39.
Two days ago, in Dallas, he became the highest scorer in the history of the FIFA World Cup. Eighteen goals across six tournaments spanning two decades. He is the only man, in the long, complicated, beautiful history of the game, who can say that.
I want to tell you what those eighteen goals actually mean. Not as statistics. As a story.
June 16, 2006. Gelsenkirchen, Germany. A skinny eighteen-year-old with long hair comes off the bench for Argentina against Serbia and Montenegro. Argentina are already winning comfortably. The young substitute has exactly one job: don’t make a mess of this. He provides an assist, then scores. Six-nil final score.
He was 18 years and 358 days old that afternoon. He became Argentina’s youngest World Cup scorer in history.
Exactly twenty years later, on June 16, 2026, at Kansas City, the same man scored a hat-trick against Algeria to draw level with Miroslav Klose’s all-time record of sixteen World Cup goals. Same date. Different century, almost. First goal to record-equalling goal, twenty years to the day.
Football does not do symmetry like this. It just doesn’t. And yet here we are.
What nobody in those Kansas City stands fully knew was what Messi was carrying when he walked out against Algeria.
His father, Jorge, the man who had packed up the family’s life in Rosario and moved to Barcelona when Lionel was thirteen so that the club could pay for his growth hormone treatment, was back home dealing with a health situation the family had asked everyone to treat with discretion. After Messi scored that first goal against Algeria, he pulled his shirt over his face and wept. Teammates stood around him confused, then gentle. They understood something was wrong. “It wasn’t related to football,” Messi said afterward. “I had some tough days. My teammates gave me a lot of strength.”
He still scored three.
I have watched Messi play football for the better part of my adult life, and I genuinely do not have the language to tell you what it takes to do that. To be that far from someone you love, carrying that kind of private weight, on the biggest stage the sport has, and still produce a hat-trick. His first at a World Cup. In his two hundredth international appearance.
Six days later in Dallas, Argentina faced Austria.
In the ninth minute, Messi stepped up for a penalty. The record, Klose’s sixteen goals, was one goal away. He stuttered his run-up. The ball went wide right. I imagine every Argentinian watching the game aged slightly in that moment.
Here is the thing about Messi that separates him from everyone else I have watched play sport. He does not carry a missed penalty into the next action. There is no visible sulking, no head dropped, no body language of defeat. He simply recalibrates.
Thirty-eight minutes in, Thiago Almada let a pass from Facundo Medina roll through his legs untouched. This looks careless until you realise it was a decision, made because Almada had already seen what Messi had seen: the Austrian goalkeeper was leaning. Messi’s left foot met the ball and curled it into the corner. Seventeen World Cup goals. Record equalled. Record broken. History.
Deep in stoppage time, he added an eighteenth. Not a spectacular goal. A scramble inside the box, a shot blocked, a rebound, a finish through a crowd of Austrian bodies. The kind of goal that requires presence, timing and the absolute refusal to stop moving. That refusal is the thing. At 38, in his sixth World Cup, after a missed penalty, after days of private anguish about his father, he was still moving.
The number eighteen sits alone now at the top of a list that contains the names of every great striker who has played this tournament since 1930.
Miroslav Klose, whose record Messi broke: sixteen goals across four World Cups, a disciplined, intelligent German forward who made a career out of being exactly where the ball was going to land. Kylian Mbappe, who on the same evening that Messi set the record of eighteen, scored twice against Iraq to pull level with Klose on sixteen. He is twenty-seven years old. He has time.
Behind them: Ronaldo, the Brazilian one, on fifteen. Gerd Muller, fourteen. Just Fontaine, thirteen, all in one tournament in 1958.
Messi has twelve World Cup goals since turning thirty-five. He has done the majority of the work of this record in what should have been the decline phase of any footballer’s career. He scored seven in Qatar 2022, winning Argentina the title, winning the Golden Ball, doing the one thing his entire career had told the world he could not do until he finally did it.
Now five more in two games at this tournament, with Jordan still to come.
There is something about watching greatness at this stage of a life that hits differently when you’re watching it in real time.
I am a football fan, but I am also someone who runs a business, who tries to build things, who thinks often about what it means to keep going when the easier decision is to slow down and let someone else take the weight. Messi did not have to be here. He said himself before the tournament that he wasn’t sure if his body or his mind would let him. He had a hamstring problem. He is 38. Normal people at 38 are thinking about their knees on stairs.
He decided to show up anyway. And then, carrying grief he hadn’t asked for, he showed up inside the showing up.
The tears after the first goal against Algeria moved me more than the goal itself. Not because I am sentimental about footballers crying, but because it told me something true. He is not a machine. He is not performing invincibility. He is a man who loves his father, who was far from home when his father needed him, who had nowhere to put that except into the only thing he has done with his body since he was six years old.
He put it into goals.
Eighteen of them, across twenty years, across six World Cups, from the skinny substitute in Leipzig to the man who writes his name at the top of the only record in football that nobody will now approach in any of our lifetimes.
Happy birthday, Leo. Go win the thing, AGAIN.
Last year, a VP of Engineering at a mid-sized UK retail firm found Brainium through a search. He read enough to be interested. He filled out the contact form. And then he vanished.
Three weeks later, we followed up. His reply was brief and blunt: “We went with someone else. Your site made us work too hard to understand if you were the right fit, so we moved on.”
He was not complaining about our capability. He was not complaining about our pricing. He was complaining about the experience of trying to evaluate us. That sentence sat with me for weeks.
For decades, B2B sales ran on information asymmetry. You held the knowledge. The buyer had to come to you for it. Gate the content. Force a demo request. Run them through your qualification funnel. You held the cards, and that leverage was real.
AI killed that advantage overnight.
Today, a prospect can describe your service category to any AI tool and get a vendor shortlist, a comparison of models, a set of qualifying questions, and a rough pricing benchmark before they ever visit your website. The research that used to happen inside your funnel now happens before they enter it. Which means every gate you erected, every “book a call to learn more” wall you built, every form that stood between a buyer and basic clarity, is now working against you. Actively.
I have been watching these patterns show up in the market week after week, and they map to findings IDC published recently on the same shift.
The first is gated content. When a buyer can get a summary in thirty seconds from an AI tool, asking them to trade their email address for a whitepaper is not an exchange they want to make. Worse, if your best content sits behind a form and is invisible to AI indexing, you have removed yourself from consideration before the buyer even knew you existed. The gate does not slow the buyer down. It routes them to your competitor.
The second is multi-step qualification chains. Buyers today want to self-evaluate first. They want to see the product, understand the value, and decide if a conversation is worth their time, before they talk to anyone. When you put three discovery calls between them and that understanding, they do not wait. They move on to someone who trusts them enough to show their hand.
The third is opaque pricing. “Contact us for pricing” used to create negotiating leverage. Today it signals one of three things: inconsistency, a commercial model that cannot survive comparison, or a fear of the market. When a buyer can benchmark your alternatives in minutes, withholding pricing does not protect you. It sends traffic to whoever publishes theirs.
The fourth is requiring a human for basic information. A buyer should not have to schedule a thirty-minute call to find out whether your platform integrates with Salesforce. If getting that answer requires a sales conversation, they draw the obvious inference: if pre-sales is this much effort, what does post-sales look like? Your documentation is not a cost. It is your first sales conversation. It should be a good one.
The fifth is what I call discovery theater. When a prospect has to re-explain their company, their pain, and their requirements to three different people across three different calls, what they hear is that your internal coordination matters more than their time. High-intent buyers read that as a preview of the engagement ahead. Most of them are right to.
After that conversation with the UK retail VP, I told my team something that shifted how we think about sales entirely.
By the time a buyer reaches us, they are not at the start of their journey. They are near the end. The research is done. The shortlist exists. Our job is not to qualify them. It is to confirm what they already suspect: that we are the right choice. That is a completely different motion.
It means your website needs to answer the questions buyers are asking AI tools, not just the questions that make you look good in a brochure. It means your case studies need to be specific, not polished. Real numbers, real outcomes, real constraints, even the ones that make the project sound harder than you expected. It means your pricing model, at minimum, needs to be visible. And it means your sales process needs to carry some respect for the fact that the buyer already knows things.
At Brainium, we had to work through this ourselves. Our Dedicated Hiring service is actually straightforward: vetted engineers, onboarded in forty-eight hours, at roughly half the cost of a local hire, no long-term commitment. That is the entire value proposition. It should live on the homepage, in plain language, without a form standing in front of it.
For a long time, it did not. It does now.
The buyer who found you already made a decision. The only question is whether your website confirms it or reverses it.
She had solved the matching problem.
Six weeks after launching the quiz, the founder in Pune was looking at a return rate that had dropped from 14 percent to 6 percent on her hero serum. Her support inbox had quieted. Her customers were arriving at the right product the first time, because they had told her exactly what they needed and she had listened.
But she was looking at another number now. And this one was harder to explain away.
Her post-purchase upsell was not working.
She had set it up the way most Shopify operators do. A third-party app sitting between the order confirmation and the thank-you screen, showing a “you might also like” carousel of three products. Customers who had just bought the serum were being shown a vitamin C booster, a night cream, and a facial mist. All reasonable suggestions. All completely generic.
The attach rate was 4.2 percent.
She called me to ask if that was normal. I told her it was actually above average for a cold carousel. Then I asked her what she knew about the customer in the moment that carousel was showing.
She thought about it. “I know what they just bought.”
I asked her what else she knew.
Another pause. “I know their skin type. I know their primary concern. I know what gaps they said they had in their routine. I collected all of that in the quiz.”
So why, I asked, is the upsell showing them a generic carousel instead of the one product that the quiz already identified as the logical next step in their routine?
She did not have an answer. But the question was the whole problem.
This is the most common failure mode I see in D2C checkout strategy. A brand invests real effort into understanding the customer at the top of the funnel, and then forgets everything it learned the moment the transaction is complete.
The quiz had written her customers’ skin profiles directly into Shopify Customer Metafields. The data was sitting there, structured and permanent, every time a customer hit that post-purchase screen. The upsell app had no idea it existed, because the app was not built to read it. It was built to show a carousel. So it showed a carousel.
This is not a technology problem. It is an architecture problem. And Shopify’s Checkout Extensibility is the tool that closes the gap.
Most founders hear “Checkout Extensibility” and picture a settings panel somewhere in their Shopify admin. It is not that. It is a fundamental redesign of how logic can be applied at the most valuable moment in the customer lifecycle.
Before this architecture existed, modifying what happened inside or immediately after the checkout required injecting custom code into a checkout template that Shopify did not officially support editing. It was brittle. It broke during platform updates. It created security surface area that Shopify’s compliance frameworks did not cover. And it ran outside the performance sandbox, which meant every clever upsell widget was silently taxing your Core Web Vitals.
Checkout Extensibility replaces all of that with a sandboxed environment built on UI extensions and WebAssembly components. Your post-purchase logic runs inside Shopify’s own infrastructure, not bolted onto the outside of it. It has direct, native access to the order that just completed, the customer profile attached to that order, and the live inventory state of your entire catalogue.
That last part is what matters for what she needed to build.
The implementation she eventually built has three moving parts, and the logic connecting them is simpler than it sounds.
The first part is the trigger condition. When an order completes, the post-purchase extension reads two things: the product that was just purchased, and the customer metafield where the quiz wrote the skin profile. If the customer said their primary concern was pigmentation and they just bought the serum formulated for pigmentation, the system knows they are mid-routine. They have the treatment. What they do not have yet is the booster that enhances it.
The second part is the product selection. Instead of a static carousel, the extension queries the Storefront API in real time with the profile data as parameters. It returns one product. The one product that the quiz logic already identified as the correct next step for this specific skin type and concern combination. Not the three most popular products in the vitamin C category. The one product that makes sense given what this customer told her four weeks ago when they first visited the store.
The third part is the inventory check. This is where the legacy approach used to create operational nightmares. An out-of-stock item appearing in a post-purchase offer generates a confirmed sale that cannot be fulfilled. Checkout Extensibility communicates directly with Shopify’s inventory ledger. If the recommended product is below the buffer threshold she set, the system skips it entirely and surfaces the next match in the logic queue. The customer never sees a product that cannot ship tomorrow.
There is a reason this logic should live here and not on the product page or inside the cart.
On the product page, a recommendation creates a fork. The customer can choose the original product, choose the recommendation, go back and compare, or leave entirely. You are introducing optionality into a decision that has not yet been made. Every option you add is a potential exit ramp.
Inside the active checkout sequence, the same dynamic applies. A cross-sell attempt before payment is processed is a gamble with the primary transaction. One moment of friction, one unexpected line item, one question the customer did not want to have to answer, and the cart gets abandoned.
The post-purchase window is structurally different. The primary order is already confirmed, already paid, already sent to the order management backend. A rejected upsell at this stage has a zero percent chance of costing you the original sale. The customer has already made the hard decision. You are asking them to make a much easier one: do you want the thing that goes with what you just bought?
And because Checkout Extensibility enables one-click authorization, the secondary purchase does not require the customer to re-enter their card details or shipping address. Those are already in the system from the transaction they just completed. The friction has been reduced to a single binary choice: yes or no.
The trust is at its peak. The data is already in the room. The only question is whether your checkout is smart enough to use it.
Her attach rate moved from 4.2 percent to 11.8 percent over the following sixty days.
That number needs context to mean anything. At her average order value of around three thousand rupees, the upsell product was priced at roughly twelve hundred rupees. Before the rebuild, on a hundred post-purchase screens shown, she was capturing four secondary transactions. After the rebuild, she was capturing almost twelve.
But the number that changed the shape of her P&L was not the attach rate itself. It was the CAC on those twelve transactions.
Every post-purchase sale carries a customer acquisition cost of zero. The customer was already acquired. The ad spend, the influencer fee, the discount code that brought them in, all of that cost is attributed to the primary order. The secondary transaction is pure incremental revenue, and its only costs are the product and the fulfilment.
At a 40 percent gross margin on the upsell product, that incremental revenue flows almost directly to Contribution Margin 3. When you are building toward a 5:1 LTV to CAC ratio, there are very few levers that move it this cleanly. The quiz improved both sides of the equation simultaneously, as we covered last time. The intelligent post-purchase offer improves the LTV side without touching the CAC side at all.
The quiz told her who her customer was. The checkout used that knowledge at the moment it was worth the most.
Three months after both systems were live together, she showed me something I had not anticipated seeing so quickly.
Her email retention flows had started performing differently. Not dramatically. But measurably. The thirty-day reorder sequence, the one targeting customers who had bought the serum but not yet returned, was converting at a rate about 2 percentage points higher than before.
The reason, when we dug into it, was straightforward. The customers who had taken the quiz, bought the serum, and then purchased the booster through the post-purchase offer were a different cohort from the ones who had only bought the serum. They had more invested in the routine. They had made two consecutive decisions that reinforced each other. The booster made the serum work better. The serum made the booster feel necessary. By the time the thirty-day email arrived, these customers were not being asked to remember a brand they had tried once. They were being asked to restock a system they had already built.
This is what the series has been building toward from the beginning. Each layer compounds the one before it. The margin discipline from the earliest posts funds the ad spend. The ad spend brings in qualified traffic. The product page converts that traffic without leaking trust. The retention flow extends the lifetime of each customer. The quiz lowers return rates and sharpens targeting simultaneously. And the intelligent checkout turns the single highest-trust moment in the customer relationship into a revenue event that costs nothing to acquire.
She is not spending more to grow. She is extracting more from what she already built.
That is the whole argument.
This is post ten in the series on D2C profitability on Shopify. The earlier posts cover retailer margin costs, ad attribution, discounting’s hidden tax, store design, membership commerce, the 90-day retention flow, the product page, the post-purchase upsell, and zero-party data. If you have not read them, start from the beginning.
If you want to build a native, data-connected checkout experience on Shopify, Brainium engineers this end to end.