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Bharat Kumar

Talk of shareholders or expansion plans can come later. For starters, this CEO would like to speak of insights that make a company tick.

Shiva Ramani

THIS man is different. Not for him the usual quote on his complete commitment to his stakeholders, the number of thousand square feet he is adding to his business or why India's crumbling infrastructure is his nightmare. All that, we are sure, are important to him, but here he gives you some insight into the CEO's mind.

In a chat with eWorld he talks about the sales process, how he wants his people to say "No" when they mean "No" and what new areas of business he senses could lift his company, Slash Support, into the next orbit. Excerpts:

How are sales leads reaching you now compared to, say, two years ago? Is your selling effort any different now from then?

I feel that we are, finally, reaping the benefit of specialising as a technology support organisation. We have 25 customers and each of them is, in turn, in touch with some 20-30 decision makers. Word of mouth is a powerful means to reaching a client.

What is different now is that sales cycles are coming down. From the time we meet a prospect first till we begin a pilot for that client, it now takes between three and four months, compared to about nine months earlier. This is a significant reduction. It's a direct effect of our size going up.

How does size matter for orders?

Clients are now convinced about viability. They also realise, that with a 2,000-strong team, it would be easy for them to scale up, if they need to. Earlier, if we were pitching for deals requiring 10 or 15-member teams, we now pitch for 100-member deals. Interestingly, the client takes the same time to decide on either kind of deal.

We see that in addition to providing support for enterprise applications and consumer applications, you are also onto open source support including support for Linux. What are the prospects here?

Open source support is a relatively new dimension to our business. It is disruptive technology. At the enterprise level - as against retail users with Linux on their home PCs - there is no dedicated software support provider.

Those who provide licences do not completely provide support for the software that helps run servers. Also, even if the licence cost is zero, the cost of onsite support for Western countries is high. Skills in Windows support now typically cost $50 per hour while Linux support costs thrice as much in the US. Providing support out of India is definitely a business opportunity that can only grow.

We are also moving towards an era where you will see enterprise resource planning (ERP) in the open source space. Providing tech support there too would be a great opportunity.

You talk of doubling your strength from 2,000 now in a year's time. From 800 a year ago, have management issues on priority changed? How do you see them a year on?

What is now important for me is to prepare our middle-level managers to manage bigger teams, from managing 10 people to managing 100 or even 200 people at a time. We would like to do what Jack Welsh did with his Croton centre. We have intensive training programmes for our managers. We pick a few at a time, and for about three months, some 9-10 of them at a clutch spend all their time in going through these sessions.

It involves training in floor management, process management and also imparting leadership skills. The faculty and course are all in-house since we know our business best.

More importantly, we want our folks to be good at "push-back". It is important to clearly tell a client whether a certain feat is possible or not. For instance, if a client were to request a job be done in 12 hours, it is not the done thing to agree, and then come back at the eleventh hour and say it isn't possible.

And, clients may make such demands because they may not know what it entails to have it delivered in that time frame. It is important for us to know that heroism does not lie in managing a crisis well. In the West, making sure that crises don't happen is heroic in itself.

What portion of your revenues comes from enterprise application support, consumer support, enterprise server maintenance and open source support?

About 45 per cent comes from the first two businesses each. The other two give us about 4 per cent each. But in two years from now, each of these four businesses should give us 25 per cent or so.

That means Enterprise server maintenance and open source support must grow significantly in that time. These two emerging areas should help propel us into the next orbit.

What would that orbit be?

We want to reach $100 million between two and three years from now. For that, we need to bet on areas such as open source support. In addition, we want to increase the number of thought leaders in our company from four to 10 by then.

We see that you have added a fourth facility in Chennai. Aren't you looking at consolidating your space outside the city as is the norm with most companies in most cities?

We want to remain within the city. From experience we know that good project managers are those that can come to work at will and are not regulated by timings of buses leaving for the city. And our business depends on strong business managers.

bharatk@thehindu.co.in

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