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NEWS
Apara: the new face in professional services
Apara Enterprise Solutions, a high-end infrastructure solution
provider is transforming itself into a professional services company. Abhinav
Singh says that high-growth segments and overseas business will fuel Apara’s
topline growth.
Five entrepreneurs came together in 1993 to offer system integration services.
Eleven years later what started off as an Rs 20 lakh operation is now generating
revenues at the rate of Rs 93 crore a year. With 130 people and 400 enterprise
level customers that include some big names such as GE Capital Services, BSNL
and Citibank, Apara Enterprise Solutions has a come a long way. The company
is now looking at overseas markets for joint ventures (JVs) and acquisitions.
It has already entered into a MoU in the Middle and the Far East and is set
to venture into the European, Australian and US markets.
Apara has moved away from being a product-centric solution provider to a
customised solutions provider with a strong focus on Disaster Recovery (DR)
and Business Continuity (BC) catering to BPO units, call centres, banks and
telcos. In intelligent networking, it is offering SSL security, bandwidth
management, load balancing and failover and its customers include the likes of
Rediff, Indiatimes, Netmagic, Reliance and VSNL. In the recent past, the
company has won some of the biggest security deals in the country including
those from Reliance, Bharti, and AT&T. Apara has also won the data centre
deployments for GE Capital Services, Citibank and VSNL. Apara deployed a SAN
for ABN Amro.
In partners we trust
Entering into collaborations to satisfy diverse customer needs in a more
focused manner is one of the basic tenets of Apara’s ‘go-to-market’ strategy.
It already has technical alliances with around 40 vendors such as Network
Appliance, Hitachi Data Systems, Veritas, NetScaler and Trend Micro among
others. M S Sidhu, managing director Apara Enterprise Solutions says, “We make
value additions to our technical alliance partners’ products and provide a
complete solution to our customers.” Apara is planning to have more
partnerships with companies in the IT consulting space. It has also
collaborated successfully with Vincity Networks to provide remote management
services to some customers and is building strong relationships with its
channel partners. Sidhu says, “Our channel partners understand our business
and this helps them win customer accounts across India, especially in smaller
towns. We regularly train them so that they are up to date on technology.”
The Malavalli factor
With Kumara Malavalli (co-founder of Brocade) becoming the
chairman of Apara, the company has benefited from his experience in the field of
storage. Malavalli’s guidance is expected to give Apara a foothold in the global
market. Says Sidhu, “Malavalli’s vision and mentoring have helped us grow
rapidly. He has also helped us with relationship building in the storage
segment.” Last year Malavalli invested Rs 10 crore in Apara. The investment will
help expand Apara’s footprint in India and abroad.
Acquire, collaborate and grow
Acquisitions, joint ventures (JVs) and partnerships will be
the key to gain overseas customers. Apara’s approach will depend on market
conditions prevailing in different geographies. Acquisitions will be a major
thrust area, especially in non-English speaking countries such as France and
Germany. Sidhu says, “Local customers feel more comfortable dealing with local
rather than foreign companies. Hence the acquisition of local companies is
essential to win customers in non-English speaking countries.” Having
established its presence in Saudi Arabia and Sri Lanka, Apara is now eyeing the
European and US markets. It has signed MoUs with companies in Korea and is
looking forward to tying up with companies in Malaysia, Hong Kong and Thailand.
Apara is also considering the prospects of establishing its own subsidiary in
different markets. It plans to build a presence in eight countries in the coming
year.
New found opportunity
Apara is planning to tie up with large Enterprise Application Software (EAS)
vendors to sort out issues related to discrete storage systems and to fine
tune ERP systems in the telecom, oil & gas and the banking, financial services
and insurance (BFSI) verticals. It would do this in partnership with EAS
vendors. The company is also contemplating alliances with system integrators
such as CMC, TCS and HCL among others on a project-to-project basis where they
can leverage Apara’s skill sets. K N Prasad, head, Marketing and Alliances,
Apara Enterprise Solutions says, “We are supporting new applications like
multimedia messaging through our intelligent storage infrastructure. We are
building relationships with companies in the telecom and middleware segments.
Our focus will continue to be on providing end-to end storage solutions,
security within storage and intelligent networking i.e. optimising application
performance and consulting.”
For Apara, the bulk of its 34 percent projected growth that will help it
achieve a revenue target of Rs 125 crore in 2005 is expected to come from
storage and storage services (50 percent) while the balance is split between
professional services, security and intelligent networking. The company is
also looking to recruit the right people with specialised skill sets for
pre-sales and deployment. It is planning to add 80-100 people by the end of
2004.
Storage will continue to be a major focus area for Apara
and the company has some interesting projects involving Information Lifecycle
Management (ILM) and SAN security for banks.
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