K V Jagannath, CEO, Choice Solutions shares insights into the company’s eventful journey as an IT solutions provider and how it has transformed with the changing times
Please briefly tell us about your journey as an IT solutions provider?
It has been very eventful and great journey so far in past 25 years after inception of Choice Solutions Limited. We started in the year 1991 and the same year India redefined business economy and opened up to conduct business little easier than the License Raj. We started as a partner to major brands like Lotus, Symantec, Microsoft and lot more small OEM’s and distributors to sell license software, then we moved into IT power infrastructure in big way and paved way to be PAN India presence, after that we started the renewable energy business in solar technologies, international software development in the education space, we were one of the first in IT partner community to start consulting and solution provider in Data Center space, storage and backup solutions, IT management and Energy and Power Audit business. This made us to be a very comprehensive solutions provider. Today we have offices in 11 locations and planning many more as GST is going to pave way for ease of doing business across the country. We have decent size of several hundreds of workforces working with a single mission to make Choice Solutions more successful.
We had 360 degree experiences in M&A. This happened in 2008 and we had a failure with huge learnings, then 2013 we had a great success in acquisition of our USA entity to a multibillion dollar company and lastly Choice Solutions had an exposure to acquire a major stake holding in Eco Power (P) limited who were dealing in energy management solutions and products.
How much effort have you put in to become one of the most powerful as well as influential SPs in the country? In short, what has been your ‘success mantra’?
Our focus from the beginning or inception of the organization has been as follows:-
- Whatever we did we focused to be the best and depth in solutions, consulting or systems integration of all our product and services
- We always focused on empowering our teams to be aggressive and decisive in decision making in front of the clients. We always focused on the person who is in front of the customers. He is one who takes powerful decision on commitments, building relationships and preparing commercial proposals and closing them as well
How has been your firm’s growth in the last one year?
Estimated Revenue for the fiscal year 2016-2017 (in INR Crore) is 68,39,35,186, while revenue for the fiscal year 2015-2016 (in INR Crore) was 76,38,77,511. Today, we are focusing more on profits to the company than turnover. Hence, we are more focused on internal brands of services and consulting than the physical IT infrastructure and allied products.
Could you tell us about your key areas of expertise?
Our key areas of expertise include IT services and solutions, Power, Infrastructure Management Service, Audits, Datacenter and Software Development. Some of our major business clients are: – Accenture, Bharti AxaLife, Mytrah Energy, BE, Cyient, Sai Life Science, Ranbaxy Laboratories, Maruti Suzuki, Liberty, Videocon, Ratnakar Bank, Laurus Labs, Valio India, Medvarsity, Apollo Tyres , Signode India, Capgemini, Aditya Birla Group, CoMakeIT etc. We have our offices at ten locations across India namely Gurugram, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Chennai, Mumbai, Pune, Coimbatore, Hyderabad, Visakhapatnam, Vijayawada.
We have evolved ourselves to be agile and nimble company to focus more on our own internal brands and not on the size of projects. We have achieved success in Software and IT solutions, IT management, Power audits and energy audits and energy management products and solutions.
We have also built our own software products around education, marketing campaign software and order management systems. The current focus is on internal digital transformation in order to support customer process requirements. Additionally, we have already started the process to look into new cutting-edge technologies.
Please provide us a snap-shot of your future roadmap?
Presently, we are focused inward into India as it provides the most promising future due to our rate of growth and high degree of internal consumption. We are looking at future expansions with in India as GST will facilitate to get into other major cities and smaller cities.
