Manish Tandon, Managing Director, Questa Software Solutions talks about how the company has developed expertise in licensing consultancy and project management
Q. Tell us about your journey as an IT solution provider?
We started our journey as an IT solution provider in the year 2002. Initially, it was a tough fight as I was only managing the whole show. Subsequently, I received support from the industry friends including distributors, vendors, and clients and since then, we kept growing. Today, we are a 15 year old company providing end to end IT solution to our clients.
Q. What all best practices should be followed by a solution provider?
First and foremost, one has to be focused. Develop expertise in one field and excel in it. Sometimes, we feel that there is more in other’s plate but before switching one should do internal SWOT analysis and move only if confident. Be customer centric and if you show loyalty, they will reciprocate. You should also have the vision for the upcoming changes and be ready for the challenges.
Q. Talking about your company, how has been its growth in the last one year?
We have grown close to 15 percent last year and our top line revenue was about ` 7 crore. Our cloud sales have increased close to 200 percent. Besides, we have done well on our bottom line as well.
Q. Tell us about your business operations and the areas of expertise?
We have evolved from a VAR to SI and now to Solution Consultants. We are providing end to end solutions to the clients and our expertise is in licensing consultancy and optimization. As part of the product portfolio, we offer Software Licenses, Cloud Solutions, IT Hardware including Desktop/laptops, Servers (X86 & RISC), Storage (Primary, Secondary & Cloud), Networking, etc.
We are proudly sharing premium level partnerships with Oracle, Microsoft, Dell, Quest, Quickheal, Cisco, Redhat, Corel, Adobe, Symantec, and Veritas. We are currently present in Mumbai, Lucknow, and Kanpur but serving clients pan India across all the industries.
Q. Your major achievements / projects in the last couple of years?
As a major achievement, we won a couple of specialized storage projects in Media companies. One such project was for a reputed TV channel, where we implemented Oracle Storage for Archiving and streaming of programs.
Q. What all business innovations you have done to stay ahead of your peers in the industry?
IT industry is all about innovation and keeping yourself updated. To keep ourselves in the race, we continue to learn newer technologies. We have to adopt technology ourselves first before taking it to the market. We are one of the early adopters of Cloud, wherein we started selling Microsoft cloud solution since its introduction in India. The same goes for Oracle Cloud as well. When we sensed that the software license sales are declining, we immediately got into licensing consultancy and project management.
Q. What are the challenges that you have to tackle in your day-to-day operations?
Our biggest challenge is skilled manpower. We are a price sensitive industry and can pay in proportion to what we get form our client. When we hire fresher and groom him to perform, there is always a threat that our qualified staff may be poached by the competitors. And getting any replacement is equally tough. Other challenge is finance management and the payment terms with client, as our payment dates are fixed and we don’t have much flexibility on outgoing money. Therefore, any delay in payment from client creates bottlenecks.
Q. What’s your future road map?
Going ahead, we are trying to position ourselves as solution providers, wherein we are building skills on cloud, security, asset management, and network monitoring. We have signed up with a few companies in this space and building our technical expertise as well. We have also started putting dedicated efforts in project management space and have started with Oracle Primavera. It’s a comparatively niche product and with infrastructure boom, we are expecting a good business opportunity in this field. Surprisingly, with this initiative, we are getting enquires from the global markets as well.
