Haryana’s IT ‘Bhajji’

THE JOURNEY
Based out of Karnal, Haryana, Infotech Computers & Communications (ICC), is a leading IT solution company for over 25 years with a good hold on the market in and around Haryana and Punjab. The company has pioneered into networking, wireless solutions, Apple solutions, security and backup, and storage solutions. Started in 1986 with a focus on IT training and software development, ICC is founded by Harbhajan Singh, who is currently the founder and CEO of the company. Singh hails from a business family, but he wanted to do something different and chose IT as a field to venture into. Today, he is undoubtedly one of the renowned system integrators in Haryana.
He started his venture when people didn't know about computers. Despite, challenging times, the company continued to educate through live demo to the industry people, schools and colleges. Hence, over the years, Infotech has emerged as the single largest IT solution provider supporting more than 1,400 customers across North India.

ENTRY INTO IT
After completing post graduation in Economics and certification courses in software development, Singh took up a job as a trainee in BILT Yamunanagar. After working for a month, he joined GN Khalsa College, Yamunanagar as programmer and later started coaching. Having worked at the education segment for almost 2 years, till 1985, Singh decided to go back to his home town, Karnal and took up contractual assignments to set up IT infrastructure at various colleges in Karnal.
After establishing good networking contacts in the education field, Singh decided to start his own business, with seeding capital of `35,000. With sheer dedication and hard work ICC emerged as a leading company in IT solution space for over 25 years and has been bringing newest technological superior products to enrich lives across upcountry region.

TASTING SUCCESS
With competition intensified in the technical training field, ICC slowly moved out of the training domain and diversified into IT sales and distribution. It tied up with first IT vendor TCS for the sale of its accounting software followed by Wipro. For ICC, the Y2K bubble burst in 2000 helped ICC in its hardware business as companies had to upgrade their incompatible systems for new software. The company made good revenue jump and further grew its hardware as well as software business. The company had witnessed strong relationship of 10 years with both TCS and Wipro.
Having gathered enough experience in the field, in 2009-2011 the company decided to test the waters in IT enabled services and reduced box sales. According to Singh, "Currently, we are doing 50% of box business and rest of the business is coming from software development. We have strong customer base in higher education segment, SMEs and Government. Having said that, the year 2011-12 was the most slowdown period for the company, we have seen tremendous downturn in the private education institutes. IT refreshment is going slow now, which is forcing our company to further diversify from hardware business into services business."
Presently, the company offers IT solutions with expertise in domains like computer hardware, networking, software solutions, security and power solutions (UPS and data centers). It has collaborations with vendors like Apple, APC, Acer, IBM, HP, Cisco, Cyberoam, Motorola, D-Link, Molex, Microsoft and Tata Communications.

BEST PRACTICES
Singh attributes expertise in customer retention as the major best practices. "We managed to retain our 90% customers since 1995. This is our key milestone. Our whole business model has undergone a sea change in a manner in which we used to handle operations. To further fine tune this strength, we are renovating our MIS systems to make organizational planning and project execution more efficient. If we have to remain one step ahead of competition then we have to envisage these changes and be totally geared for it. As the industry is moving towards more and more consolidation, we have to be prepared to re-invent and re-focus ourselves so that we are not lagging behind in this competitive race," Singh concludes.

FUTURE PLANS
As the company wants to focus on new areas like managed services, cloud computing and virtualization, it has started building in-house expertise in IOS devices to integrate with ERP development. Being the first IT company of Haryana, Singh has made his contributions in setting up the IT dealers association and infused knowledge of ethical business to its peers.

 

THE OTHER SIDE OF HARBHAJAN SINGH
Role model: Azim Premji
Hobbies: Watching TV
Favorite food: Masala Dosa
Favorite destination: Amritsar
Favorite past time: Classical Music and Gazals
Post Retirement: Enter the world of meditation

Sandhya Malhotra
(sandhyam@cybermedia.co.in)