Awesome Foursome

Ambition is something that can break chains and drive one towards success. It
was ambition that brought together Mahesh Kumar, Prashant Behl, Naveen Nagpal
and Jalaluddin Kokan, who formed Infonet Solutions. It has been 12 long years of
hard work that has seen the four continuing the journey as promoters of their
company without losing focus from their one target: scaling Infonet to greater
heights and establishing it as one of the leading technology companies in the
country.

The quartet started their business in 1996, when the IT boom had just begun.
While Behl and Kokan were childhood friends, Nagpal was a senior in college and
Kumar was Kokan's colleague at CMS Computers. Kokan and Nagpal studied
electrical and electronics engineering respectively, Kumar was an instrumental
engineer and Behl was a computer science engineeringing major with a keen
interest in technology. Banking on their strength of technical knowledge in the
structured cabling area, the quartet started their business in Behl's home.
Initially, the company provided structured cabling solutions and their primary
success was helped by the fact that at this time the industry lacked solution
providers who could provide end-to-end services in this particular area of
business expertise.

Slow and steady growth

The company began in the dining room of Behl's home and was later relocated
to his father's office. While, Kokan and Kumar were first gene­ration
entrepreneurs, Behl's family had a sports business and Nagpal hailed from a
chemicals business family. Behl and Nagpal's business acumen, which they had
acquired from their families helped the company to a huge extent, especially in


terms of knowledge legalities, registration, the other complexities involved at
the time of starting.

Although Infonet was lucky in terms of getting big orders due to their sound
technical knowledge, the company upgraded their skills on a regular basis to
attain more business. The foursome believe that providing strong technology
solutions to their client quickly has been the USP of the company. Setting up
their own office space had been a huge moral booster for them. They pride
themselves on the fact that they have retained every single customer till now by
providing cutting-edge techn­ology solutions

Partners of Infonet: Jalaluddin Kokan, Prashant Behl, and Naveen

The triumph of value business

The company focuses on value business rather than in-volume business and the
foursome has not been attracted towards it despite several offers from vendors.
Despite the fact that acquiring of projects has been slow, they feel that they
are growing steadily. “There were few alluring offers to venture into run rate
business, however we have been very clear about our intention of only dealing
with value business, as we have complete confidence in our technical ability and
have been quite content with what we have been doing for years. Few feel that
economically the volume business is better and they point out that transactions
would be slow in project-based business but it is definitely more reliable,”
claimed Kokan.

Similarly, certain decisions that the quartet had taken paid off well. The
alliance with HP was one such positive gamble for the company, where they have
been unipolar with only offering HP solutions and have no other tie-ups.
However, the company does have a partnership with Cisco for active networking
compo­nents, Molex for passive networking components and few solutions with
Nortel, APC, VMware and Panduit. “First of all we need to have confidence in the
product with which we are dealing and only then we can convince others to
believe in it. HP has been the best for us and the partnership has been fruitful
for the company's growth,” Kokan added.

There have been lots of offers from other vendors for potential partnerships
with the company that could have well been profitable, but Infonet has strongly
remained faithful to HP by saying no to all of them. But the rejection to these
alliances hasn't slowed down the growth of the company and their technical
abilities. Infonet has been the first company in India to partner with HP for
VDI with mobile thin clients as well as successfully implementing huge projects
in this product.

Rocky roads

It hasn't always been smooth sailing for Infonet after their initial project
successes. When the dotcom bubble burst in 1999 there were investments from the
IT companies and the industry completely nosedived. Infonet suffered a huge
setback and there was no business for 12 to 18 months. “We realized that there
were more things that we needed to learn other than just making money. Building
a strong team is a difficult task and managing it is tougher. We had to keep
giving salaries to our employees to prevent the team from collapsing,” Kokan
reminisced

The four entrepreneurs had to usher in more personal resources and assets to
safeguard the business and its employees. “We took the challenge and came out
with flying colors. We had to strive hard for the customer's acceptance. Slowly,
the situation also started to improve and the rest is history,” he asserted.

The promoters never forget to thank “Global Reality”, the company that gave
them a second breakthrough during their lowest point.

The power of unity

Generally when there are many people in the management of a company with
equal powers, too many thoughts crop up and decision making gets tough.

For Infonet, however, this has not been the case even though there would be
long deliberations, as people here believe in each other more than themselves.
“For every decision the company takes, there would be huge amount of
deliberations among us. Strategic decisions like remaining unipolar has been a
hugely debated topic. But the confidence that we have on each other triumphs all
and we accept it if someone makes a valid point, whoever has made it. This has
been a great strength for the company,” claimed Kokan.

Although there is no formal power sharing agreement among the four, each
takes care of a different portfolio. Behl takes care of the implementation of
technology and the service part of it; Kokan handles the financial part of the
company; Nagpal is in-charge of the general administration and Kumar is
responsible for promotional activities of the company. Each is well-versed with
the other's responsibility and helps the other out when the situation demands
it.

Despite the work pressures, the quartet makes it a point to meet for lunch
everyday at the office and they have been following this ritual religiously for
the past 12 years. This unity is the success mantra of Infonet

The future bright

The quartet constantly tries to understand and research into new
technologies to add to their offerings and increase customer satisfaction as
much as possible. Infonet has clocked a turnover of Rs 65 crore in the financial
year 2007-08. “We are already working as consultants for large corporates and we
are leaders in implementing technology. In the next five years we are confident
that we would be one of the leading technology providers in the country and we
would like to provide technology derivatives, high-end data center solutions. We
would also like to branch out to every metro in the country,” Kokan added
confidently.

NR Sethuraman

sethuramannr@cybermedia.co.in