Role Model
Lateral Thinker
 Getting an IIT degree. Picking oranges in Greece. Heading a Rs 230 crore company. Playing the saxophone. Ranjan Chopra, CMD of Team Computers is a person of many colors. He shares his lateral views about business and life with Sharmee Roy
Ranjan Chopra, the CMD of Delhi-based Team Computers, has been at the forefront of innovation. Following his business model of knowing the customer’s customer, his dream is to make Team an IBM or a Wipro in the mid-market segment.
Hailing from a middle-class family, Chopra’s journey to setting up Team Computers has been quite eventful.
Soon after graduating from IIT-Kanpur in 1983, he landed a job with Philips and worked in its service department. Within two years he joined Raba Contel, an Apple distributor, where he worked as an IT manager. “This is where I first connected with IT as a different domain and got first-hand experience of repairing systems,” Chopra reminisces.
However, he soon quit to take off for Europe, hitch-hiking, driving trucks in France, and picking oranges in Greece. “I needed a break to do some soul searching so that I could start afresh, and Europe was a place I always wanted to visit since my college days. When I came back, a number of my friends who had worked with me at Raba Contel used to call me up for fixing their systems, and that’s when I decided to make IT services as my business.”
Starting out
With a seed capital of Rs 18,000 from his end and a contribution of 36,000 from two of his friends, Chopra launched Team Computers in 1988. In its initial days, the company began repairing systems and took advance payment for its services. “Since capital was an issue, our strategy was to take payment in advance for the AMCs, and we had some angel customers who agreed,” he recalls. Within a year, the company had a turnover of Rs 10 lakh and a team of 30.
Things went according to plan till 1990, when his partners decided to move out. “One of them wasn’t really active and wanted his money back, while the second partner had a family business of chemicals and wanted to join that business. It was clearly the turning point for me. I was left to manage everything on my own, and I decided it was time to re-structure the organization. In this, I was helped by my friend Deepanker Roy. He helped us organize ourselves into a more professional outfit.”
By early nineties, Team was servicing its way up the ladder, and emerged as the largest player to provide post-sales service for laser printers. “Those were the early days of laser printers but I knew that lasers would eventually become popular among businesses and that would create a lot of opportunities in providing post-sales service (AMC contracts) in future.” Team’s leadership became evident when it clocked a turnover of Rs 3 crore in 1995.
A strategy shift began when HP established a direct presence in India in late nineties. Chopra explains: “With market leader HP setting up direct presence a lot of people started getting into the laser repair and maintenance business. We realized that this business may longer be lucrative and therefore decided to orient ourselves toward customers looking for long-term relationships, and thus started focusing on the mid-market segment.”
The company gradually reinvented itself from being an ASP to becoming a solution provider. However Chopra was looking for that distinguishing factor that would put Team in a different league than its peers. He did so in 2004, when he was among the first few channel companies to enter the business intelligence (BI) solutions space market.
In the BI space, Team today boasts of being a leader not just among its peers but even among the biggies. “Over the last three years we have completed 110 projects. I would like to believe that we are ahead of some of the bigger players in this space by the sheer number of projects done by us,” says Chopra. About 60 percent of Team’s business in the BI category comes from the BFSI segment. Three years back, Team set up a US subsidiary to focus on BI. It has been able to acquire 18 customers, and has partnered with a company in ocean transportation for dashboard applications. “Our US subsidiary generated $1 million last year, and we are constantly looking to tie up with product companies. But with the current state of the US economy, we haven’t set any targets for this business,” Chopra informs.
Business blend
Today, Team has grown into a Rs 230 crore company, of which 40 percent is contributed by infrastructure building solutions (IBS), 30 percent by infrastructure management support (IMS), 20 percent by BI and the remaining by business applications (BA) and business process management (BPM).
Growing at the rate of 70 percent, the IBS division is focused on building infrastructure solutions such as data center networks, and has strategic tie-ups with vendors like Cisco, Acer, Lenovo, HP and IBM.
Team was also among the early players in the IMS space. The company set up its NOC three years back. “We were the early ones to realize the opportunity in remote infrastructure services and also faced quite a few challenges early on. However the concept has gone mainstream now and the RIM business has picked up,” avers Chopra.
The BA division was started two years back and has a tie-up with Microsoft for ERP and CRM. “We are still in the early stages of building the foundation. The beginning has been good with at least one project per month in the last one year. Most of these projects have been in the services sector,” states Chopra.
Team created the BPM division last year and is looking to tie-up with BPM platform vendors. One of the key highlights was a BPM project for Fullerton India Credit which was worth Rs 1 crore. “Though it’s been only a year since we started with BPM and are in the early stages of understanding the business, this project was a major win for us. It involved their non-core banking processes like the loan calculator and profitability calculator.”
With a customer base of 1,200, the SI acquires five new customers every week on an average.
Innovation and processes
A lateral thinker, Chopra likes to do things differently. This prompted him to start a corporate gurukul program. “In ancient times students used to stay at a guru’s place and assimilate knowledge. Similarly, we have tied up with the MDI Gurgaon for offsite training to develop leaders for the future.” The company presently has 1,400 employees, out of which 60 percent are certified.
Chopra also brought systems to the organization and created a whole process layer called order to cash management. “As result, we have been able to reduce the sales cycle by 60 percent and have increased our net profit.”
Team has also developed some in-house tools for infrastructure support. There’s SmartDesk, which is essentially a system to track SLAs. Another tool, Unidesk, helps resolve IT, HR and administration issues.
Also different is its classification of customers. Based on IT spends and future potential, customers are classified into platinum, gold and silver. “This helps us manage our customers more effectively and capture a substantial portion of their IT spends,” Chopra points out.
One of the more interesting innovations has been the CXO Cockpit, a decision support system. “I think every CXO should have something like this where information is available at one’s fingertips in the form of a dashboard.”
The company has recently started a helpdesk. “Instead of sending technical people onsite, we thought of introducing tele-support to manage customer calls remotely. This is done out of our offices in Delhi and Mumbai.”
On the agenda
In 2009, Team intends to get into business transformation services. For this, it is looking to tie up with consulting companies. Says Chopra, “These consulting organizations would be responsible for providing strategy to customers on what business they should be in. Once this is done, we will help the customers implement that strategy.”
On the BI side, Team will be moving into BI 2.0 and advanced-level dashboard design. “We will be developing vertical-specific products and solution accelerators that can be deployed easily.”
With a presence across 40 cities, the company is looking to settle for a turnover of nearly Rs 250 crore in the current financial year. “In the beginning we were growing at 40 percent month, but now with the slowdown this has dropped. However, we are still expecting to grow at 15 percent even as the market growth rates may be less than 10 percent,” Chopra discloses.
Man of many colors
Chopra loves music, something which goes back to his college days. “While in college I was more into rock, but with time graduated to jazz and picked up how to play a saxophone. I play live at numerous parties and occasions among friends and family,” he smiles.
Favorite artistes include Jimi Hendrix, Santana and John Lee Hooker. Chopra’s dream is to open a jazz bar in Delhi, and he has also zeroed in on a name for it: Zorba. But “real estate is a problem, so for the time being we are using the office terrace for the jazz bar. I have also put in place a group of amateur jazz musicians to play there.”
Red wine is another passion. “Wine has been my passion for 20 years, and these days I’m exploring new world wine: South American, Californian and Australian.”
On the spiritual side, Chopra has been regular with Art of Living classes, and draws his inspiration from Ashtavakra Geeta. “It has made me strong. I have been able to absorb a lot of key points from this source document, and have internalized it in my work and personal life.” |