Role Model
Customer oriented
 Ajay Sawant, President and CEO, Orient Technologies, shares the key factors that have contributed to the success of the company
By Trupti Ramball
Being vendor neutral and customer focused is what has made Orient Technologies a success that it is today, opines Ajay Sawant, President and CEO, Orient Technologies.
The company is recognized to have the best financial management among tier-2 partners, and is also regarded as a company with strong skill-sets as nearly 50 percent of its 500-odd employees are certified on various technologies.
“Customer-centricity is our DNA. We put ourselves in the customers’ shoes to understand their business challenges and compulsions, and then suggest the best solutions. We don’t consider ourselves as a technology provider but as a business solutions provider,” he says.
Starting up
Regarded among the leading tier-2 systems integrator today, Orient actually started business reselling telecom products like fax machines, tele-printers etc.
Recalls Sawant, “After doing my BE Electronics, I was employed with a UK company selling and servicing telecom products in India. During my two year stint there, I struck up a camaraderie with fellow employees Ujjwal Mhatre and Jayesh Shah. Soon, the idea of starting our own venture took root.”
In 1991, Orient Telefax was launched dealing with vendors like Godrej, Canon, and Global Telesystems. “We had negligible money to invest and hence the only investment we three could make was our sweat capital. Also, our stint at the UK-based company had helped us to establish a strong rapport with several customers we serviced.”
From 1991-94, the company witnessed a good growth in the business, however by then the office telecom products’ market was tapering off and IT was becoming a buzzword. “Many of our customers were asking for IT solutions. IT was promising to be a high growth industry compared to the telephony and fax products, and hence we decided to shift,” informs Sawant.
In 1994, the company started reselling and signed up with Indian manufacturers like Zenith and HCL catering to retail and SOHO segments. In no time, the company emerged as the largest partner for Zenith.
“One year after we entered IT we became the largest partner for Zenith in the country, and that gave us tremendous confidence. What helped us in our successful journey was our complete focus on providing the best service to our customer. It became a strong differentiator,” he opines.
In 1997, Orient took over Award Infotech owned by Umesh Shah. “Orient was the no. 1 Zenith partner, while Award was the second largest. Although we were competitors, we shared a great rapport with the Award team. We decided to join hands as we felt we would be able to widen the gap between no. 1 and no. 2 even further, and also service bigger customers and projects,” recalls Sawant. At the time of the merger, Orient had an annual turnover of Rs 8 crore while Award’s topline was Rs 2.5 crore. The company was soon rechristened Orient Technologies.
Move to solutions
In 1998, Orient decided to move from catering to home and SOHO to SMB and enterprise customers. It included servers and networking products in its portfolio and consequently moved from Indian vendors to MNC vendors like IBM and HP.
In the wake of dot-com bust, years 2001 and 2002 bought about drastic changes. The tech slowdown that followed compelled Orient to review their business model and layout a plan for the next five years. The core management got down to chalking out an action plan for the future.
“The tech slowdown taught us two things—to have a strong business differentiator and second to be bottom-line focused. We laid out the technology areas we should build our expertise in, which would make us a preferred customer choice,” he says.
The company realized that to be a serious contender in the solutions space, having strong pre-sales skills is a necessity. “Many ridiculed our move, saying that it would only add to our overheads. But today, we believe, we have the finest pre-sales team among our peers with the best and latest certifications. This has proved to be a strong differentiator and played a key role in helping us bag many large enterprise accounts where our competition was Wipro and HCL,” says a proud Sawant.
In the year 2005-2006, Orient became one of the first companies to offer virtualization and application delivery solutions in the country by signing up with Citrix. Even today the company is the largest Citrix partner in the country. “In order to build our Citrix expertise we first successfully deployed their application server within our organization. The ROI benefits it delivered to us became a strong proof-of-concept for us when we went out to customers,” he believes.
Sawant says that the company’s focus on virtualization and infrastructure solutions has helped it bag several large projects despite the slowdown including: the Rs 4 crore virtualization project for Barclays Bank; the Rs 5 crore Connect India project for Ambuja Cement; the Rs 2 crore application delivery project on Citrix for Fullerton India, and application and data centralizing project worth Rs 3.5 crore for Glenmark Pharma; the Rs 3 crore VMware deployment for Eureka Forbes and Rs 1.5 crore deployment for Crisil. As a result, the company has sustained through the slowdown better than many of its peers. The company is a Gold Partner for Citrix and VMware.
The company expects to close the current fiscal at Rs 104 crore, a growth of 10 percent over Rs 95 crore posted in FY2008-09. It has set an aggressive target of achieving Rs 250 crore in topline within the next two years and focus areas include automated managed services; storage solutions and business continuity solutions and services.
In August last year the company rolled out its automated managed services, with an investment in a network operations center (NOC). It is managing about 1,200 nodes currently and plans to triple the count by end of 2010.
On business continuity front, the company is in the process of building the infrastructure and skill-sets in providing complete solutions.
Orient is clear that services are key to future growth and success. “We are seeing a strong shift in the IT buying trends with many companies moving from Capex to Opex. This shift suggests that every thing will be delivered as a service to the customer, who will in turn pay-per-use. Hence, our future plans are all geared toward providing services whether in the cloud, or through a NOC. We expect to increase the share of services revenue to our business from the current 20 percent to 35-40 percent over the next couple of years and for this we are investing in people and infrastructure,” offers Sawant.
Key factors for success
One of the key reasons for the company’s success is its unwavering focus on bottom-lines. “Our executives do not accept any deal that does not meet our profitability targets. All our deals should fetch us a minimum of 15 percent gross margins,” Sawant adds. The company’s financial management is rated high by vendors and distributors alike and what’s significant is that Orient is a debt-free company.
The other aspect that has been key to Orient’s success is its focus on people. The company is strongly focused on training, a little wonder then that out of 380 sales, marketing and technical employees about 220 are certified. The company also has a strong training culture within the company and conducts different training sessions every month. “Every employee has to go through at least one intensive training program every year on soft-skills, technical skills and negotiation training,” he says.
The other reason why employees are encouraged to undertake the training session is so that they are focused on the company’s priority—the customers. “Our employees should be able to empathize with our customers, have a complete understanding of their needs and problems. We have always maintained that we are customer-focused and vendor-neutral.”
But it is not all work at Orient. “We are all very passionate about cricket. Every year we organize a cricket tournament at DY Patil Stadium,” he says. And while there might be unrest in the parliament due to woman’s bill, Orient takes its fairer-sex employees very seriously. “We have a Ladies Power Club and a ladies cricket team too.”
Also having five strong directors has been a boon for the company. “It is great to have a strong team of partners who compliment each other. For instance, Umesh Shah, Director, Finance, is strong in client servicing and management; Ujjwal Mhatre, Director, Marketing, understands the pulse of marketing; Jayesh Shah, Director, Technical, is the pillar that brings technology focus; and Pankaj Jain, Director, Human Resources, is a complete people’s person. My strengths, on the other hand, lie in operations and finance,” opines Sawant.
The company has created a strong 20-member core team to ensure business continuity and succession.
“For long-term success it’s important to broaden the management skills and have a strong succession plan. We have a leadership program to identify and groom leaders for the future and this will be key to how Orient grows over the next five years,” concludes Sawant. |