Ajay Sawant, Managing Director, Orient Technologies believes in developing skills of his employees and, in turn, adding value to the customers.
Briefly tell us about your journey as an IT solution provider?
Orient was formed way back in 1992 and we began our journey by selling fax machines, telex, and tele-printers. In 1994, we spin off our business in IT and started selling assembled and Indian brands like Zenith. In 1998, we added MNC brands in our kitty including the likes of Digital, HP and Compaq. In 2000, we moved towards selling value added solutions based on storage, virtualization and networking. And by 2003, we moved to infrastructural services and since then, we offer a complete package as an IT solution provider.
What all best practices should be followed by a solution provider to become one of the leaders in the industry?
It is always debated – whether customer comes first or the employees. As a solution provider, we need to manage both. We keep on developing skills in our employees and in turn adding value to our customers. Our success mantra is to keep questioning ourselves – why do we exist and why customers should choose you. Whatever answers you get to these questions, keep on raising this question.
Talking about your company, how has been its growth in the last one year or so?
We are growing year on year in both top-line as well as bottom-line. In FY 2016-17, we clocked the revenue of ` 243.4 crore, whereas in FY 2015-16, we were at ` 202 crore. This shows that we grew by 20.5% last year.
Could you tell us about your business operations like your areas of expertise, major clients, vertical focus, number of locations you operate from, partnerships, etc.?
Orient is headquartered in Mumbai and having branch offices in Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Gurgaon, Hyderabad, Kolkata, and Pune. We also have Singapore as branch servicing to IT/ITeS customers.
Our major focus is in BFSI and pharma verticals. And our expertise lies in cloud, virtualization, networking, and security. We have partnered with vendors like AW, Cisco, Citrix, Dell-EMC, HPE, Fortinet, IBM, Microsoft, and VMware among others.
What have been your major achievements / projects in the last couple of years?
We helped NPCI in setting up UPI – Unified Payment Interface and Department of Information Technologies to set up SWAN (state wide area network) where 721 Grampanchayats are connected to Mantralaya.
What are your strengths in terms of core technologies? And how do you constantly innovate to stay relevant in the market?
We have set up a NOC in 2004 and provide value added managed services through it. This reduces cost and time for our customers. Virtualization and building cloud is a practice in Orient. Adapting to change makes us more relevant to customers. Learning new technologies and keeping pace with it makes us more competitive. IoT and AI are new buzzwords in market but yet not hit market at mainstream. We feel ecosystem is not ready to take on these markets.
What are the challenges that you have to tackle in your day-to-day operations?
Getting trained resources for the right opportunity is a big challenge in our industry. Retaining skilled people is the other problem. All other problems are manageable.
Please provide us a snap-shot of your future road map in terms major projects in the pipeline, future expansion plans, looking at the global market?
For the fiscal year 2017-18, we have kept a target of ` 300 plus crore and knowing the business opportunities lying ahead, we will definitely achieve this figure or more.
