Becoming Omnipresent

Atul begun to envision a dream, which today has become a well established reality with consistent growth, known as Omnitech InfoSolutions.

Atul Hemani, MD and CEO, Omnitech InfoSolutions is an astute professional with an engineering background from University of Mumbai, contributing his experience of over 26 years in the IT industry. Adding to his repertoire, he had worked for two years with HCL, prior to promoting Omnitech.

In this capacity, Atul plays a vital role in steering the overall business growth strategy and accomplishing organization vision. Today, he leads the able team to implement the business strategy through definitive action plans to achieve desired results. These days, his thrust areas are to be a thought leader in the area of managed services and cloud computing and continue to be pioneer in disaster recovery and business continuity space.
Omnitech was born in a spare garage owned by his partner Avinash Pitale's father in Thane, Maharashtra, in 1987. From there to today, Omnitech now delivers cutting edge technology and software solutions that are tailor made and fulfill IT requirements. Hemani strongly believes that people, systems, processes and vendors are all an integral part of its endeavor to serve its customers better. Hence, they invests heavily in knowledge, technology, resources and improved people skills. The company has witness growth over the years and today its global network extends to UK, Europe, USA, UAE, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan.

Initial Days
Post his engineering days, Hemani was keen on starting something of his own right from his engineering days. After graduating from Mumbai's VJTI Institute in 1985, he had joined HCL as a customer support engineer. This is where he met, Pitale, and together they began to envision a dream, which today has become a well established reality with consistent growth, known as Omnitech InfoSolutions.

Both these individuals worked till they saved enough money to make the initial investment for their dream project. It was in 1987, when these two young mid-twenties individuals, quit their jobs and jumped the entrepreneurial bandwagon. Backed by their technological know-how and an undeterrable determination, they started the company.

 

The IT industry was in its budding stage then, and it was a difficult decision taken by these guys had taken as parents were also sceptical about this venture at that time. However, later on as the company grew, support was ushered in from family along with much appreciation. A year after the company started off, Hemani got married to Amisha, whom he considers as his pillar of strength and a constant motivator for him.
Things began to work out for them as they has bagged two clients -a small computer institute and a data processing provider company-on the first day itself through personal contacts. The first assignments were to sell a personal computer and printer and they signed a PC maintenance contract.
Destiny was slowly indicating what was in for these duo. Within two years, they had inreased the headcount at the organization as well as the number of business clients. In the first year, the company closed it book at Rs 8 lakh, and this entire capital was reinvested into business to further fuel and sustain the growth momentum.

These guys survived on the bare minimum money for the first couple of years of the long journey they had embarked and had determined to see through till the end. It was the fire to grow and expand backed by steely resolve and determination along with vision into future, which enabled them to grow over these years.

Growth curve
It was in the year 1990 when they moved from Thane to Byculla and in the same year came up with the game changing innovation in their offerings, diskless terminals. These were plug and play devices to be connected into LAN (local area network) and were very well accepted by the market.
For the next five years, the company grew but there was not much concrete roadmap or strategy in place. Then came 1995, Hemani and company sat down and took the first step of drafting their business plan and strategy to achieve the laid down goals. The company also adopted the aggressive path for growth and over the next couple of years expanded the organization.
Then came 2000 and the internet bubble burst, the company forayed through a rough patch for few years later. Canbank Venture Fund invested Rs 4 crore in us for a 28% stake who exited three years later in 2003. This made it possible for the company to raise up to the next level and also establish its 20,000 sq ft head office, Omnitech House at Marol MIDC, Andheri, in 2006.

Few Milestones
From here, there has been no turning back, Omnitech was the first to introduce a state-of-the-art disaster recovery centre in the country at Mahape, Navi Mumbai, in February 2008. In 2011, the solution provider launched REVIVE-Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) on a cloud platform, a first of its kind IT solution based on the pay-per-use model. Recently, it has launched "Octane App", a high performance managed IT services CIO Dashboard to easily monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of services delivered based on the defined Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

The path ahead
Today, the company has its presence in seven states in India as well as in six international markets. Apart from the Mumbai head office, its has two technology centres and branch offices in Mumbai, New Delhi, Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune and Ahmedabad.

 

Since 2011-12, Agility 2.0-Making Organizations Agile is what Omnitech is the motto of the organization. To follow the agility curve, Omnitech plans to make continuous investments in its core pillars of strength, viz. people, processes, infrastructure, tools and technology. The company has been following multi-pronged strategy to increase its reach and penetration. It has forged alliance and partnerships with local companies to get into new geographies. It has also prudently acquired companies to gain domain expertise, expand into new markets that offers strong cross selling and offshoring opportunities.

Last year has been an exciting year for the company as it grew 46% yoy on a consolidated basis and in its course, achieved a small yet significant milestone of revenues of Rs 500 crore for the first time in the history of their company. Going ahead, Hemani's company plans to explore various modes of inorganic growth such as Contract Buy Out, Captive Unit Buy Out and Strategic Alliances in niche and focused business segments
Hemani has now over 20 years of experience in the IT industry and is now aspiring become a mentor at Omnitech.