Fastest Growing SP (Silver): Apara Enterprise Solutions : Back On The Growth Path

Two key things contributed to the growth of Apara Enterprise Solution during
last fiscal.

One was customer retention, where it managed to retain its customers, who
have been giving consistent business. The other growth contributor was a new
base of customers, who have been looking at the opportunities on the networking
front, with regard to storage consolidation and other service aspects. In short,
the correct whetting and selection of its clientele helped the company trace its
steps back to the growth path it had charted some years ago.

Apara has been focusing on niche verticals like storage consolidation,
backup, disaster recovery, virtualization, high-performance routing and
switching, content delivery network, bandwidth optimization and security, apart
from services, to a great extent.

The company forayed into virtua-lization with its tie-up with VMware and the
secondary storage market by tying up with Quantum.

Satinder Sharma of Apara Enterprise Solutions receiving the Fastest Growing SP Silver Award from Khazanchi of Xerox

Its services division turned out to be a profit generating one for Apara
during the last fiscal and the revenue from this division could even be touted
as the key to the growth of the company.

60 percent of the revenue came from IT, IteS and telecom segment, followed by
BFSI and SMB, which contributed 20 and 17 percent, respectively. HR was also
another area where the company scored.

Two years ago the company slipped from its 100 percent growth rate and then
went into red, going from Rs 60 crore that it posted in FY 2005-06 to Rs 45
crore in FY 2006-07. But it bounced back from this slump to post a 100 percent
growth in FY 2007-08, which was ironically the year when other performing
companies were battling with the effects of the slowdown.

The company was wise enough to ignore certain opportunities and certain
customers that weren't benefiting the organization in terms of better margins or
that didn't have a good reputation. It was selective in terms of choosing those
projects that offered big margins and made business sense over those that
didn't. Over all, a complete control on business strategies brought Apara back
to the helm.

In FY 2007-08, Apara obtained new certifications from various companies like
Juniper, NetApp, Symantec, Hitachi, and deployed few notable projects like MPBN
Implementation for Ericsson, storage consolidation for Lehman Brothers and
consolidation and data recovery for NSE.

As far as the tie-ups were concerned VMware, F5 Networks, Riverbed and
Quantum were the companies that Apara added to its list as it kept its eyes
focused on the niche technology ball.

The company has proposed to focus more on services and that too in expanding
and leveraging on existing services like product-independent services and
increasing the contribution from services business to 30 percent of product
revenue.

NR Sethuraman

sethuramannr@cybermedia.co.in