9.Services Business: Ensure Growth

Datacraft is one of the three companies among the top 10 of the DQCI Silver Club that registered a double-digit agency revenue growth last fiscal. Its agency revenues grew by 19 percent to touch Rs 174 crore in 2001-02 from Rs 147 crore in 2000-01.

Datacraft decided to beat the recession by getting into services in a big way. In 2000, it had come out with the Millennium Plan under which it aimed to make services contribute 50 percent of its revenue by 2003. It was in this direction that it constituted seven SBUs last year. "Each of the seven SBUs were targeted at getting into service segments, which contributed almost 78 percent to our overall revenue," says Dilip Kumar, CEO.

Each of these SBUs have their own business unit managers who are responsible for running it independently. "We have changed the organizational structure to promote the sense of ownership for the company," explains

Dilip.

These units comprise insite managed services, primer implementation services, uptime management services, cabling services, training services, security solutions and OSS and BSS solutions. Of these, insite managed services and uptime maintenance were the star performers last year. This year, training and security are expected to gain impetus.

Datacraft also launched IP contact center solutions and increased its focus on acquiring intellectual property for the managed, uptime, training and security services. "We have done crucial investments on getting technically qualified people," says

Dilip.

Datacraft is the only Cisco Gold certified partner in India and recently received IP telephony revised specialization from the company. It also opened a STARtrac contact center and its first full-fledged training center at

Bangalore.

MEASURES THAT BROUGHT MOOLAH: Created seven SBUs to offer services to customers Bagged large orders from the banking sector

Banks were a key customer segment for the company last year. It bagged a $18 million order from SBI for the the first year of a three-year project.

Other customers included Standard Chartered, Deutsche Bank, HDFC, ABN Amro and Credit

Agricol.

Datacraft is now coming up with its new three-year strategy, where theprimary focus will be on IP technologies apart from services. To start with the company will open more points-of-presence in the country. Currently it has 14 offices which it plans to increase to 30. This move is expected to help the company make further forays into the banking sector, where it is imperative to give on-site support to various branches.