The IT Trailblazers of 2013

Chetan Shah

Strongly following the adage, ‘Live, Don't just exist', Chetan Shah, CEO of Xpress Computers firmly believes in planning ahead for each day's work. He started his company in 1987, and steered it from a small system builder to a well known systems integrator, offering a wide range of products and solutions, with a team of 75 people as of now.

He built Xpress as a process driven and highly customer focused company, adapting fast to the changing needs of his customers and driving technology and business innovations.

In 2013, he launched Xpress web hosting solutions-www.xpresswebhost.in -to take business places online. With dedicated servers, VPS, SSL certificates and shopping cart he propagated 'ready to use sites' for a business for a seamless online presence with its wide boutique of online offerings.

 

Apart from this product, he also launched Xpress Launching Xpress Bytes-an online portal/magazine of collection of the best tech news from around the world sourced from different portals -on the most popular news app FLIPBOARD on IOS and android. This focuses on the latest bytes from different technological companies among others.
As one of the founding members of Association System Integrators in Retailers in Technology (ASIRT) and promoter, he ensures business of all partners touches not only large volumes but even small partners conquer new horizons.

He went vocal for assembled PC makers to not to include them under this BIS certification rule as many would be then forced to shut their shops.
On the personal front, Shah likes trekking and rafting. Also, he spends more than one hour daily on jogging, walking, swimming and cycling.

 Atul Hemai

Atul Hemani, MD and CEO, Omnitech InfoSolutions is an IT professional with an engineering degree from University of Mumbai, contributing his experience of over 26 years in the IT industry.

With a clear vision of an enterprise wherein he should be a market leader, within 3rd position, or it should be sold off, he kicked off his company.

In the year 2013, his prime focus was on Agility 2.0-making his organization Agile and to follow the agility curve, he made continuous investments in its core pillars, viz. people, processes, infrastructure, tools and technology. He has been following multi-pronged strategies to increase its reach and penetration and forged alliance and partnerships with local companies to get into new geographies. He also made It has acquired companies to gain domain expertise, expand into new markets that offers strong cross selling and off-shoring opportunities.

This year, Hemani's company signed a three year contract with Solapur Janata Sahakari bank to install and support Next Generation-Real Time Gross Settlement (NG-RTGS) and three niche Payment Solutions.

The contract involves helping the bank to go live on Next Generation RTGS along with a three year Management Services contract. It involves making the Gateway Servers fully operational by installing and configuring all relevant hardware and software, Network communication with regard to NG RTGS Primary, standby and Disaster Recovery Site. It also entails implementation of Omnitech's three niche Payment Solutions for Notifications, Liquidity Management and Payment Messages Reconciliation.

With its continued focus on becoming a Transformational Partner for the Cooperative banks, the company's Payments Center of Excellence has been working on solutions that will help these banks get timely and accurate information while reducing the manual parts of their business processes and simultaneously improving the efficiency of their automated processes.

Hemani's company saw a net loss of Rs 46.88 crore in the quarter ended September 2013 as against net profit of Rs 7.18 crore during the previous quarter ended September 2012 and and the net sales declined 41.31% to Rs 64.56 crore in the quarter ended September 2013 as against Rs 110.00 crore during the previous quarter ended September 2012, as widely reported.

But, the figures did not result in dearth of enthusiasm in Hemani, who idolizes Jack Welch, ex-CEO of GE.

Limesh Parekh

Daring Limesh Parekh, CEO and co-founder of Enjay IT Solutions, metamorphosed his company from a thin client computing vendor to an IT solutions vendor concentrating on home-grown solutions around mobility, security, CRM among others.

After the successful launch of its ThinClient OS, earlier in 2013, he launched Enjay Synapse Mobile this year, a unique mobile call logging and reporting system, which enables mobile call logs along with geographical locations to be sent to an online reporting portal: www.synapsemobile.com.

He is betting big on the enterprise mobility space to make this solution handy for organizations of all sizes-be it large enterprises or SMEs-but having a roaming sales and support team. One of the major breakthrough was that he also released Microsoft Outlook Connector for Enjay Synapse Mobile, which gets all the mobile call details and relates them to MicroSoft Outlook directly. This means that now onwards, a user can not only get the email conversations from Outlook, but also all the call logs related to a particular contact.

Parekh started his company in 2007 with a vision to empower SMEs in India with innovative and inexpensive business solutions. The Company has since launched products that have been sold in various segments of SME industry and also education. His mission is to provide ground breaking technology solutions which are affordable to customers and profitable to partners. His company aims is to offer solutions and technologies that are perceived as unaffordable for SMBs and to make these available at attractive price-points. He saw that enterprise mobility or IP telephony is considered to be expensive and is unaffordable to typical SMB when they approach to big vendors like CISCO, AVAYA etc.

Through his company, Parekh not only broke price-barriers but also ensured that a similar quality of service is provided. His company's solutions are priced at few thousand rupees.

The man is steering his company to new heights and aims at more than 50% growth this fiscal over the last.

Pawan Jajodia

After successfully driving Computer Association of Eastern India (COMPASS) as a treasurer and looking well into the financial matters, Pawan Jajodia has been re-elected as president of the association for tenure of one year. He has been the forefront of the COMPASS IT EXPO-the mega IT and technology fair. Before his election as a president he also served as the chairman of the expo committee and continues even now.

Considering that a wide range of gadgets and gizmos were introduced to the market this year, Jajodia did not confine the IT expo to usual set of hardware and software. He introduced, for the first time, a gaming competition in the expo to involve more students and educational institutions.
He is actively working to make this event a grand success and the budget of expo is likely to cross Rs 1 crore. He also steered the online promotion of the expo and has been very proactive over the marketing front and has used the social media to propagate the forthcoming expo.

Jajodia is now responsible to take the association to new heights and make sure that all the members work in unison. This is his second tenure as the president. Earlier, he was elected in 2007 where he was credited for bringing in new initiatives.

Anuj Modi

After his MBA degree from the Indian Institute of Planning and Management (IIPM), Modi, director, Modi Infosol, entered business in 2004 and continue his father's legacy.

In 2013, Modi tied up with Ctrl-S, CtrlS-a tier IV data center company-to distribute its data centers nationally. He bets on the global market scenario, which has already moved to data centers, saying that the Indian market too, has followed the same trend. Modi plans to diversify its portfolio with this tie up and also plans to add a significant value to it.

Earlier, in this year the company tied up with Uniline to distribute its range of products.
Modi's typical day starts 10.30 in the morning, at his office premises in Nehru Place. He starts his day with going through his e-mails and keeps himself updated on his team. Change is the rule of the nature; the philosophy, in which Modi believes. He feels that in this industry nothing is fixed and things may change overnight. One of the most important challenges he thinks is that there is no predictability to the market.

 

 Muthuswamy A

 

Ex-Confed president, Muthuswamy A, who played a crucial role in steering Confed activities during his tenure, has been vocal about the way in which the current office bearers of Confed-ITA were working.

He was critique of the way the current leadership decided to elect the president and new office bearers without executive committee consensus. Also, he put forward his doubts over the way Akshyam project was handled and also expressed concerns over the way ethics was sidelined. He feared a nexus among all the current office bearers to suppress a major controversy. However, there is nothing proved yet.

But there were certain actions taken: Two of Confed's Executive Committee (EC) members from Nagercoil district filed a law suit against Confed "from inducting the so-called new office bearers.

S Subramonian and J Sha filed a case in Coimbatore Munsiff Court-lowest court in any district-and thereby obtained an injunction on the Confed's declaration of the next president elect.

This led to a further discussion in the association and further to its members to deliberate on the issue. Muthuswamy spoke when no one dared to go against the current leadership. Even if the current situation is stalled and lead to no result, Muthuswamy did set a platform for a transparent association.

Sathya Prasad

This year Sathya Prasad of VANPAC Systems, got a new responsibility and he became the president of Association of Information Technology (AIT), Bengaluru to steer the association to new heights. As the president, his major role would be to ensure that the partners conduct a healthy business and devise plans to tackle the online threat.

Coming to his business, last fiscal he led his company to a decent 8% growth even in a challenging FY13 and plans more than 10% growth next year and touch Rs 70 crore by the end of the current fiscal. Most of this is expected to come from sub-distribution of desktops, networking, components and laptops. As of now his main focus is into components business which he thinks would fetch him better margins.

The company has a total strength of 25 employees, which Prasad has interestingly retained for the last two years. This is important as he has streamlined internal business policy to reduce vendor dependency and has focused mainly on outsourcing its need of manpower. He followed a simple rule to recruit trained and skilled people in order to avoid attrition. He is betting high on Samsung and targets to squeeze in substantial revenue from its large format display products.

 Kailash Gupta

 

A graduate of BITS Pilani, Kailash Gupta kicked off his career as an entrepreneur and established ETSC Computers, formerly known as Electronics Trade & Service Center (ETSC) in the year 1985, in Jaipur.

His company, a value added sales and services company of IT infrastructure, did well amidst current scenario of inflation and global crunch. It grew by 25% with a concentrated focus on manufacturing segment, which generated around 50% of its revenue.

In March 2013, he bagged a big order for HP desktops and printers from DGS&D-the central purchase organization of the Indian government. Following this in mid-August he led his company to win contract for HP supplying products-- 1000 units of desktops and 2000 units of printers-to Rajasthan Electronics and Instruments. This was a big order of Rs 5 crore.
With this contract, the Gupta has doubled the top line for his company for this fiscal over the last.

He believes that Rajasthan has a good scope in the IT/ITes segment but substantial has not happened till now. He believes that the new government would be the harbinger of IT related growth in the state.