THE BIG DADDY OF CHANNELS

href="http://www.dqweek.com/Allied-Digital-enters-Cloud-computing-space">Allied
Digital has surely
emerged as the most powerful solution provider in the country. Thanks
to the determination of Nitin Shah the company has managed to remain
at the top since the day it started its operations in the country.
Shah is one of the pioneers amongst the Indian solution providers.

Today, the company
operates in all facets of the infrastructure management business,
wherein it provides managed services around infrastructure. Its
expertise lies in understanding the pain areas of customers and
providing solutions to them. Allied has customers in practically
every industry including BFSI, healthcare, and airlines amongst
others. Besides being present in more than 132 locations in India, it
also has presence in Australia, Singapore and US. It has witnessed
astronomical growth in the last few years. Its CAGR has been in
excess of 58% y-o-y. And the revenue for the year ending 2011 has
been around Rs 650 crore.

In the last couple of
years, Allied has made significant progress in implementing
innovative projects for its customers. For example, it has
implemented a private cloud solution for one of the largest
recreational vehicle manufacturers, which reduced their operation
cost by almost 70%. The Data Center Modernization Project that it
managed for a very large fund house in India, was delivered on time.
In order to become one of the most powerful as well as influential
SPs in the country, Shah feels that it is essential to plan, market,
build a brand and make investments in technology, people and
processes. This alone can transform average resellers into successful
managed service providers. Allied has invested heavily in building
state-of-the-art Network Operations Center (NOC) and Security
Operations Center (SOC). Another aspect of managed services is
providing right proposal to prospects and that's why the company
has invested heavily in proposal center group. Besides these
investments, it also conducts regular training courses for its people
in technical, process and leadership aspects of service delivery.

Shah also believes that
cutting-edge technology can be delivered to customers through
innovation. This has prompted the
company to invest in Center of Excellence, where its resources have
all necessary infrastructure
to experiment and create innovative solutions. The company has also
created an Integration Engineering Group and a Special Interest Group
to create new offerings. Its service delivery framework is one
example of innovation. Every business has operational challenges.
Since the managed services business is people intensive, the major
challenge for Allied as a company comes from resource management.
Even managing the entire growth cycle of resources is another
challenge.

The other challenge faced
by the company is partnership management wherein the expectations
that are set initially become
difficult to manage with passage of time. Lastly, the tools and their
performance also pose a big challenge for Allied as a managed service
provider. Meanwhile, in order to become the leader in the industry,
Shah believes in following and practicing 5 simple steps, ie
providing better customer service, understanding customer's
business culture, educating customer, maintaining rapport with
customer, and sticking to the commitments made to a customer. The
future seems to be very bright for Allied, as it has the right
resources and excellent leadership to take it to the next level. With
a strong sales pipeline in all the geographies that it operates in,
the company has plans to create a huge additional capacity for
expanding services for its international customers.