Role Model
Customer centric
 A Chartered Accountant, Sanjay Agarwal, Founder, Momentum Infocare fell in love with IT when he realized its transformational value. His motto in life is to help customers derive maximum benefits from IT
By Tabrez Khan
It’s one thing being a good professional, but being a successful entrepreneur is an entirely different ball game. Yet, Sanjay Agarwal, Founder and Director, Momentum Infocare has managed to perform both roles with élan.
A Chartered Accountant by qualification, Agarwal started his career in finance in 1993 with a regional airline—Archana Airlines. He swiftly graduated to being the finance head of the company by the late 1990s. However, crunching numbers and tallying balance sheets was not enough for this dynamic professional.
As finance head, Agarwal also handled the IT function of the airline company. He was instrumental in implementing its ticketing and reservation system. Although IT was not very big then, he realized the value it could bring to any organization.
“Being the finance head, I also lead the IT department and implemented key IT projects. It helped me realize the difference that IT could make to any business. I sensed that it could be a key competitive advantage for any organization. That realization slowly gave way to a determination to start my own IT business,” Agarwal reminisces.
The beginning
In 1999, Agarwal quit Archana Airlines to start Momentum Infocare, an IT infrastructure company, along with two of his friends. Momentum focused on providing the entire infrastructure set-up including desktops, servers, UPS devices and networking to organizations.
“We did several important projects, including end-to-end IT infrastructure projects for companies such as Supreme Industries, Sterling Tubes and Bhartia Industries, among others,” says Agarwal.
In 2001, Momentum tied-up with Citrix to implement the latter’s infrastructure solutions across organizations. “It was an important move as it helped us position ourselves as a solutions provider from being just an infrastructure provider,” recollects Agarwal.
By 2005, Momentum had already established itself as a strong player in IT infrastructure. However, Agarwal and his team also realized that the competition in the infrastructure segment had become stiff and margins had narrowed considerably. “We could no longer make good money selling desktops and servers. The competition had also become cut-throat. During that time, we witnessed clients increasingly demanding security, back-up, storage and connectivity solutions. That’s when we decided to increase our focus to solutions and security,” says Agarwal.
Security solutions and services is important to Momentum’s solutions portfolio, with almost 80 percent of the revenue coming from it. Today, Momentum is also a key Microsoft partner and has bagged Best Partner-North India recognition in 2008 from the software giant.
“Our strong focus on security solutions, backup and Microsoft technology solutions from 2005 onwards helped us accelerate our growth in the last four years. We have moved from being a hardware and AMC-centric company in early 2000 to a solutions centric company after 2005,” says Agarwal.
During 2005 and 2009, Momentum bagging several key IT services contracts from some large clients including Max New York Life, IBM Daksh and some other large corporations across verticals. “One of our largest projects in terms of size was for Kazastrov Engineering, where we set-up the entire end-to-end infrastructure including HP Blade servers, Symantec Backup solution, Trend Micro anti-virus solution, Sonicwall UTM and Microsoft Exchange server,” says Agarwal.
Momentum saw a steady rise in its fortunes with revenues growing from Rs 12 crore in March 2007 to Rs 17 crore in March 2008, and Rs 25 crore in March, 2009. “In the last one year, we have consolidated our position in security, storage and back-up market with some key projects for clients such as Deutsche Post Bank, Safexpress and Ricoh,” adds Agarwal.
Current business
Today, Momentum boasts of a large list of reputed clients including C&S Electric, Group4Securties, Dr Lal Path Lab, Bajaj Hindusthan, Sistema Shyam Teleservices and S Tel (joint venture between Siva Group, formerly Sterling Infotech Group, and BMIC).
Despite the economic slowdown that took the wind out of the sails of many IT entrepreneurs, Momentum has managed to grow considerably even through the rough patch, thanks mainly to its focused approach on core infrastructure solutions.
“The slowdown certainly has had an impact. Our growth has been 10-15 percent less than what we could have achieved if conditions were right,” says Agarwal. However, he is also proud of having grown through what has been a very rough phase for most businesses across the world, and when many a business went bust.
Agarwal ascribes his company’s growth over the last few years to their commitment to training, focus on quality and transparency.
“We make it a point to train our support team, well in advance before launching any new initiative. Our philosophy is that our organization is an extended arm of our customers, and our employees must inculcate that spirit. We also have external quality audits every quarter, which keeps us on our toes so far as quality is concerned,” says Agarwal. “At the same time, we value our employees highly, and have an elaborate feedback mechanism to improve our HR and other systems,” he adds.
“For me and my partner Gurprit Gulati, the focus today is clearly on driving Momentum further as an infrastructure solutions and services company,” says Agarwal. Gulati, a former IBM hand, joined Momentum as a Director in 2005.
“We plan to grow 30-40 percent in FY 2009-10 and 50-60 percent in FY 2010-11. We would like to touch the Rs 100 crore mark by 2012. To achieve this growth, we are increasing our focus on infrastructure solutions, on site services and remote cloud services for SMB organizations,” adds Agarwal.
Momentum also plans to launch a remote infrastructure management solution in 2010 to boost its growth. Agarwal expects the solution to start contributing to the company’s revenues by April, 2010.
Another item on Agarwal’s to-do list is to open an office in Mumbai. The company is headquartered in New Delhi with a branch in Chandigarh and is now keen to expand its geographic footprint to western India.
The Person
An avid Hindi movie buff, Agarwal likes to holiday in his home town Shahjahanpur in Uttar Pradesh. He ascribes his success to support from his family and friends.
His belief in hard-work and a no-nonsense approach to work is reflected in his choice of favorite business leaders. He admires Kishore Biyani of Future Group and Sunil Mittal of Bharti Airtel for their awe-inspiring life journeys, which have seen them rise to the top of their chosen industries against tremendous odds.
“Both Mittal and Biyani are self-made individuals who have taken their companies to the top in a very short period and against established business houses like the Tatas and Reliance. The secret to their success lies in good team building skills, project execution and choice of business models,” says Aggarwal.
On being asked, how he would like to be remembered, Agarwal replies in his usual self-effacing manner, “As a good human being, which is the most important thing, and then as a successful professional.”
For the reticent CA, clearly a successful transition from finance to IT entrepreneurship is not the ultimate milestone. Agarwal is looking forward to more value creation out of services for his clients. That is what will provide the momentum to his venture in the days to come. |