Role Model
Being Wipro
Girish Madhavan, CEO, Quadsel Systems is an ardent fan of Azim Premji and has modeled his business around Wipro. His ultimate ambition is to create a company that is considered a specialist in everything it does
By Varun Aggarwal
“When the going gets tough, the tough gets going." Girish Madhavan, CEO, Quadsel Systems has led his life by this motto. A difficult childhood toughened this Chennai-native, instilling in him the drive to succeed.
Like his role model Azim Premji, Chairman of Wipro, Madhavan always wanted to build his own IT empire. So in 1996, after working for five years in an IT company, Madhavan and three of his colleagues started a venture, Quadsel Systems focused on corporate reselling.
Initial rough weather took a toll on the partnership and two of the founding members decided to call it quits. But Madhavan was determined. “We had it tough initially. Some of our customers couldn’t even pronounce our company’s name correctly. So we knew we had to create a brand recall, do something different.”
To be different, Quadsel delved deeper to understand its customers’ businesses and offered products that gave them better ROI and TCO. “Customers needed to be educated. Often, they were not aware of applications they really should be employing and different possible configurations that existed.”
“While technologies like thin client and virtual desktop are fashionable now. We have been talking about them and referring them to our customers for the past three years. We have also successfully accomplished some large installations,” he elaborates.
Within the first six months of operations, Quadsel saw revenues of Rs 20 lakh. But despite a rousing start, Quadsel faced its second setback soon after. Following a difference of opinion, Madhavan’s business partner decided to part ways.
In 1998, Madhavan took on the sole responsibility of the business as the CEO. He started working by building short-term, six-month plans. Once the first one was achieved, the next plan was formalized.
To build a stronger rapport with vendors Quadsel decided to adopt a single-vendor strategy. “I felt that to succeed it was imperative to align closely with one vendor rather than focusing on multiple vendors. Growing with a single vendor would mean strong support from them.”
Hence Quadsel decided to partner with HP who had the entire product range from printers to PCs to servers and storage. “HP continues to be our exclusive partner even today. Most products we have added today are those that do not compete with HP,” adds Madhavan.
Turning point
Four years ago, Madhavan analyzed Wipro’s success to formalize its own long-term growth strategy. “When we studied Wipro, we realized they have equipped themselves with specialized skills that enable them to get larger customers. We decided to employ that idea and started looking out for people with different domain expertise, who can clearly visualize how a project should be implemented,” he explains.
Madhavan slowly spread the company’s presence from Chennai to Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Thiruvananthapuram, Tiruchirappalli and Madurai. Recently, the company has started its operations in Mumbai and Gujarat in order to move beyond south. “We have inked several ISV partnerships. Using them, we plan to enter different customer verticals. For the last three years, apart from HP, the major projects that we have executed are based on niche technologies from vendors like Riverbed, VMware, RedHat, Citrix. The solutions we provide customers have a clear ROI and TCO defined.”
In 2008, Quadsel bagged a Rs 8 crore project from MRF to provide infrastructure consolidation, and set up a data center and disaster recovery center. Another project, worth Rs 3.8 crore, came from California Software which called for infrastructure consolidation, virtualization and WAN optimization. The company completed the troika with a project worth Rs 4.6 crore for setting up IT infrastructure (including data center, networking, software and connectivity) for the petrochemical MNC, Petrofac.
“We tell customer that we will provide them a business solution using IT tools, which will help them scale greater heights. We focus on four major areas—data center designing, disaster recovery designing, business continuity planning, and virtualization,” Madhavan avers.
The company has also built its own data center and has been providing application hosting services, DR site hosting and management and other managed services to its SMB clientele.
Recession as opportunity
Unlike most, Madhavan didn’t let recession sag the morale. “During recession, you need to be more proactively involved with the customer. We regularly met with customers, both existing and prospective, and advised them on IT solutions to help them run their company better.”
“Previously, we focused only on customer’s IT requirements. But now we concentrate on understanding customer’s business to help evolve a new way of using IT infrastructure. Our customers respect us and treat us as their business partners than mere technology providers,” believes Madhavan.
Speaking about some of the big projects undertaken by the company in 2009, Madhavan says, “We have undertaken a Rs 22 crore project for Karnataka government for smart cards this year. Recently, we also picked up a similar large project from the Gujarat government worth about Rs 10 crore. We have successfully set up data centers for three large corporate companies in India, doing a Rs 6 crore business.”
Despite the recession, the company aims to grow at 30 percent in the current fiscal from Rs 78 crore in 2008-09 to Rs 110 crore in 2009-10. “We are targeting a turnover of Rs 300 crore by 2011. Our target is to become someone like Wipro,” he says. Over the next three years, Quadsel plans to expand its footprint beyond India and be recognized as a leading global player. Recently, the company received an award from HP for Best Software and Infrastructure partner in Asia-Pacific.
A team effort
But it was not just customer focus that has helped Quadsel thrive. Employee retention and skill enhancement has also played a very crucial. “We have built an HR software exclusively to keep track of our employees’ achievements, certifications and deliveries. If we find something amiss, we bring it to their notice. It has helped them grow better. We also assessed our employees’ interest. If a person is working on a task that interests him, he is more likely to give his best.”
Elaborating further, he adds, “People usually don’t open up at their workplace. They tend to keep their problems to themselves. Even if they are assigned to a task that they find uninteresting, they will continue to do it. If we as a company do something to remedy it, chances are that they will become happier and work more efficiently.”
Market outlook
Madhavan expects the market to recover in 2010. “It will become much mature about IT.” Madhavan feels that SaaS is the next big thing. “People are already talking about SaaS. SMBs would be the front-runners in SaaS adoption.”
Speaking about his company’s SaaS initiative, he says, “We’ve already tied up with many ISVs and have ported their applications on our data center and are offering them to our customers on a monthly subscription,” he opines.
Quadsel plans move to a class-3 data center by early 2010. “The data center would be about 500 sq ft, and we will use technologies like blade servers to save space. We plan to scale it to 2000 sq ft over the next couple of years.”
Remote infrastructure management services (RIMS) would also be important on Quadsel’s agenda. The company is looking at different business verticals to understand their business, identify problems they are facing and shortlist better products and services for them. “We’re building teams for specific verticals. We have already set up specialized teams for manufacturing, IT & ITeS, education, government, pharma and healthcare sectors. We are looking at offering end-to-end IT solutions.”
Personal side
A family-oriented man, Madhavan tries to spend as much free time as possible with his wife and mother. “I invariably cook on weekends and have my family sample my culinary experiments. Work is important, but at end of the day family comes first.”
He loves to go on long drives in his Skoda Laura and dreams of parking a Rolls Royce in his garage.
Madhavan abhors the idea of long working hours. He has made it very clear that his employees shouldn’t sit in office beyond 7 pm. “If someone spends 12 to 14 hours in office, I think that he either doesn’t know his job properly or he’s wasting time. We focus a lot on productivity at Quadsel.”
He wants to be known as a person who helped make change. “I am never happy with status quo. I believe there needs to be an effort to improve the way every small job done. Even with little effort, a lot can change. We all need to do just some tweaking, and everything changes completely,” he concludes. |