Pramod Mishra: Committed To Customers

Pramod Mishra: Committed To Customers

Despite a humble beginning, Lucknow-based Acme Digitek's
business speaks volumes for itself. Yet the CEO, Pramod Mishra remains an
unassuming man. From merely selling printers, the company has graduated itself
to providing end-to-end solutions for customers. Pramod attributes this success
to his practice of delivering best customer support to his customers.

Pramod Mishra of Acme Digitek is one of the few successful
people involved in the systems integration business in Lucknow. He has smoothly
climbed the steps of the value chain when it comes to offering innovative
technology solutions to their customers. He is a science graduate from Gorakhpur
University from the 1986-87 batch.

"After my graduation, I completed my MBA from Lucknow
University in 1990. The training imparted there has given me a lot of confidence
to handle difficult issues and situations with customers and vendors," he
explains.

Having started his career with Godrej & Boyce in 1991
selling printers, Pramod has come a long way. Keeping his core focus towards
maintenance services, while engaging the core customers has paid dividend for
him as well as his company.

Pramod Mishra: Engaging existing customers with different value propositons

PROFILE

COMPANY: Acme Digitek Solutions STARTUP YEAR: 1993 CONTACT: Digitek House, 54-B Pragnarayan Road, Lucknow BRANCHES: 10 NO OF EMPLOYEES: 47 Sales (2004-05): Rs 12.5 crore Expected Sales (2005-06): Rs 17 crore

It was in 1993 when Pramod started his company under the name
of Ace Digital Systems with a clear focus towards maintenance services in the UP
region. The name of the company was changed to Acme Digitek in 1997.

Digital Equipment Corporation happens

With an aim to venture into the high-end server segment, Acme Digitek
aligned itself into a partnership with US-based Digital Equipment Corporation in
1998. With this tie up, the company soon introduced 64 bit servers, laptops and
its Alpha series of servers.

"This was a turning point in our journey and soon we
realized that we were the only serious player in this region. The tie up with
Digital Equipment really helped us towards establishing the credibility of our
company in the market. Later on this company was merged with Compaq and later,
Compaq got merged with HP," he explains.

Pramod started his career by selling printers with Godrej
& Boyce. Very soon the company was involved into selling high-end servers
for its customers in the government as well as corporate sector.

"Personally, it was a big challenge for me to convince
our customers to buy printers only. In those days, companies used to sell
printers as part of the overall PC offering. So customers had little idea about
stand-alone printers. We really had to work hard in terms of creating value
proposition for our products and solutions," he reminisces.

Soon, the company with its set of dedicated after sales
support and solutions deployment team was deploying IT equipment at various
government departments within UP. "We did a lot of IT work for UP
Irrigation department, UP academy of administration, High Court of Allahabad. It
was our core commitment towards customer satisfaction that did wonders for us,
people began accepting us whole-heartedly," he added.

Moving forward

From a modest start to shift of business to to multi-location operations, Acme
Digital has indeed traveled a full circle. Within UP itself, the company is
present in seven locations. Additionally, it has two offices in the Uttranchal
at Nainital and Dehradun. The company has also opened another office at Indore.

While its core strength on the services and maintenance side
is likely to continue, the company has intelligently aligned itself with
networking majors like Cisco and Sum Microsystems. "Moving forward, we
would work closely with Sun and Cisco to provide end-to-end solutions to our
customers. We are targeting segments like high-end storage, security and
switching. With our tie-up with Sun Microsystems, we are positioning to provide
complete solutions on 64-bit computing experience in this region," he adds.

Zia Askari