20. POCKET FULL OF: Solution

Seeing the signs of a sluggish year ahead, Accel ICIM decided to reinvent

itself as a complete end-to-end solutions provider in the middle of 2000-01.

This move helped it post a growth of 34 percent, taking its revenue up to Rs 98

crore in 2001-02, from the previous year's Rs 74 crore. It also improved its

DQCI Silver Club ranking, climbing up five notches from #25 last year to #20

this year.

A growing presence in the southern region of the country marked Accel ICIM's

performance in 2001-02. The company bagged a large number of implementation

orders from companies that were looking for a systems integrator with a

comprehensive portfolio of hardware and software. Some of these customers were

BPL Mobile, TVSE, Mitsubishi Electric and Cadburys amongst others.

Revenues largely came from depot repair services for OEMs, networking

solutions, facility management services and ISP and e-business services. It also

manufactures Intel architecture-based desktops, workstations and servers under

the brand name Mastermind, at its ISO 9002 certified factory at Pondicherry.

MEASURES THAT BROUGHT MOOLAH: Shifted from hardware sales and emerged as end-to-end solutions company Partnered with CommWorks to provide value-added services on IP networks

Accel ICIM signed up strategic alliances with global IT giants including IBM,

HP and Sun last fiscal. It also partnered with CommWorks, a 3Com company dealing

in delivering IP-based networks, to provide value-added services on IP networks.

"CommWorks is highly focused on software solutions for the telecom and

ISP markets," says NR Panicker, CMD. "Our relationship with them will

help us to leverage their strengths in unified messaging and IP-based telecom

solutions to offer a complete suite of products for telecom and ISP

segments."