'We are seeing traction around asset management among SMBs'

Vineet Arora, MD, Aditi Technologies

How has Aditi Technologies been growing since last one year or so? How is your growth determined and revenue segregated?

In the last one year or so, the growth of Aditi Technologies has been phenomenal. In the past 12 to 18 months, we have focused on our strategy, which gave us better results in terms of customer acquisitions. And obviously the growing market has helped us immensely. Market's response to the demands has helped us to grow around 40 percent in revenue over the last one year.

We segregate our revenue in couple of ways-one, by each account wherein we try to classify accounts under a category like enterprise accounts, product development accounts, etc. Secondly, we use practices like BI practice, SharePoint practice, and .Net practice. We have seen very good growth in both BI and business productivity solutions.

How does your BI framework help the business to see beyond cost-cutting?

When the market was going through crisis during the recessionary period, none of the companies had a clue in terms of how to fix it, as they didn't have enough data, projections and analysis of the situation. This brought a lot of challenges for the companies to have a clear strategy to know where they can stand and what they can do in such situation. This required investments in knowing their current state and impact of external factors on their projections, which led to BI projects being initiated in most of the companies across different sectors.

Our BI services bring immediate business insights, transforming it to the next level by helping customers to envision even the impossible. Its suite of information strategy, data warehousing, data mining and information analytic services measure, analyze and optimize business ensuring value addition to our customers.

We also witnessed developments happening around operational efficiency. To gain operational efficiency, one needs to know every single metric as part of your business. And again to achieve this, BI projects are being initiated in the companies. Earlier, from the platform perspective, BI platforms like IBM and Cognos have been very expensive. But around the same time, we saw Microsoft coming up with its own BI platform, which has evolved over a period of time. Microsoft's BI platform being cheaper and the growing need for BI projects combined with our focus on this platform have really helped us.

How do you differentiate your strategies for SMBs as against the large enterprises?

SMBs in India bring a plethora of opportunities for entities like ours. These companies do not have a big IT staff to develop solutions on their own. At the same time, they do have home grown solutions. An area where we are seeing the traction and have already started working on is around asset management. We have built a solution, called Asset Point, to address it. There are many difficult areas in these organizations where they are using ad-hoc tools like excel that does not give them any kind of transparency in their business. So, picking up those areas and designing solutions around them is a big opportunity for us.

On the enterprise side, we are identifying the key solution areas and are starting with developing consultancy components. Our approach is to understand the business from the maturity model perspective, build a BI maturity model, do the assessment of the organization as part of our consulting from a BI maturity perspective and then put them under the certain maturity model, identify the gaps and propose solutions to fill those gaps. There is a structured approach to
identify the problem areas and design solutions for those areas. We also look into the ROI behind solutions designed and then take it to the implementation level.

We are tasting success because we have end to end offerings. We approach these enterprises by saying that we understand what BI means and we can guide them through the processes and make them understand the business cases. Here, we develop the business cases for these organizations on a collaborative basis. Earlier, these enterprises used to invite industry analysts to do consulting part but having a single vendor to take care of each aspect in a focused way, in terms of expediting consulting and developing solutions at the same time, has delivered better results for these enterprises.

Your association with Microsoft goes long way back. Could you tell us more about this close association?

At the end of the day, we have to focus on areas where chances of success are higher. We have done a number of projects on Microsoft stack, which has helped us to have a deep understanding of Microsoft products and solutions. Microsoft is one of our key accounts and we want to grow with it. Besides this, Microsoft is a channel for us as well. We are National Service Integrator (NSI) partner of Microsoft. The company has many gold partners and they choose around 37 partners and term them as NSI. As an NSI, we are involved into executive level joint planning, and help in building best practices, and set the pace of innovation for Microsoft platform. As one of the top five NSIs and one amongst three Microsoft Technology Center partners, we have helped over 180 global enterprises to solve some of the biggest business product implementation challenges.

Aditi is a development partner for various Microsoft product teams, developing features, modules and sometimes entire products; so we have first-hand exposure to new technologies before they release in the market. Aditi and Microsoft run joint programs to help ISVs upgrade to the latest Microsoft products as well as migrate from competing platforms. These programs provide educational resources as well as incentives in every stage, from planning to launch, delivered to qualified ISVs.

Microsoft's SharePoint platform is already being used by enterprises today. Then what was the need behind partnership with Quest Software? \

Quest Software has tools that allow migration from Lotus Notes to SharePoint. We will work together to migrate organizations' applications to Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 along with upgrading existing customers from SharePoint 2003/2007 to SharePoint 2010. Quest Notes migration products, coupled with Aditi's SharePoint expertise will help customers to successfully plan, design, migrate and implement SharePoint 2010 from Lotus notes. Quest is a valued partner for us.

Do you see any kind of competition for yourself in the Indian market? If yes, how far you geared for it?

We do have competition in the Indian market but I believe that we are very focused in a few areas and we are best in those (from the Microsoft perspective). We see competition from the companies of our size, ie, from mid-sized companies. Since we are best in what we offer and we have our own differentiators, we are successful in almost 70 to 80 percent of the areas to whom we cater.

We believe in continuous growth and innovation. We want to be known as best company in certain technologies and would like to have our own brand that provides a better value. We will continue to add more solutions like Windows Azure and Cloud in our portfolio.

Nivedan Prakash
(nivedanp@cybermedia.co.in)