"The biggest competition that we face in our business is piracy"

Vishal Dhupar, MD, Autodesk India

Having recently joined Autodesk, Vishal Dhupar believes that the company can
tap six times the business potential than what it is currently doing. He
illustrates how the huge investments in infrastructure projects and construction
industry will help him achieve this. With 80% marketshare, while the company
barely faces a competition, Vishal's biggest worry is alarming levels of
piracy.

What kind of opportunities do you currently believe Autodesk can seek to
cash on in the near future?

We believe Autodesk can grow its business much more than it is currently
both in terms of revenue as well as market addressability. In fact, I see a
potential of this business getting multiplied by a factor of six.

What I am really looking at is the kind of growth the country is enjoying
right now. There is a tremendous amount of investment that's happening in
infrastructure projects across the country. Projects like Golden Quadrilateral
has an investment of Rs 54,000 crore. A similar momentum can be witnessed in the
construction industry. In cities like Bangalore, the business is really booming.
Beyond this new power plants are coming up, airports are being modernized and
also manufacturing industry is growing like never before.

In all these segments, Autodesk plays a very significant role as all of them
involve lot of design-enablement, which is our fundamental business. Last three
years company's Indian operations have been growing very fast and we believe
the growth rates are only going to go up in next couple of years.

As a company playing in quite a niche space, how does it help to have a
regular channel model with a national distributor like Tech Pac?

While our entire business is 100% channel driven with distribution being
taken care by Tech Pacific, similarities with business models of many other
companies ends here. We have 40 partners across the country and we interact
directly with each of these partners. What this means is that we work together
with our channel right from ensuring that they have rightly skilled manpower for
a particular project to signing the contract for that project. So our
distributor takes care of aspects like validating credit-worthiness of partners,
manage logistics, and offer financial support to partners while we ensure that
our channel's appetite for growing is met by us.

Also at our distributor's end, a team is completely dedicated to Autodesk
business and mirrors the team that we have internally. Which means that if we
have an industry manager for the manufacturing segment, a person with a similar
profile would be there at Tech Pacific as well. So in this case, our distributor
actually becomes an extended arm for Autodesk and there's a much larger scale
of synergy between the two companies.

Autodesk commands close to 80% marketshare in the space it operates in. So
do you guys every worry about competition?

We have to worry about competition more than anyone else does. And that
competition for us is Piracy. According to the studies done by BSA (Business
Software Alliance), the Indian software industry loses close to $363 million
every year. In fact in their latest report, they point that the piracy rate has
actually gone up from 70% to 73%. This is a big cause of worry for us despite no
other major player being present to take our business away.

You are introducing AutoCAD 2005. What kind of excitement do you foresee
in the market upon arrival of this product?

We have recently conducted a series of evangelization program in three major
cities. And we got close to about 500 people in each of these locations. We are
also running special programs offering our existing customers exciting options
of upgrading to the new release of AutoCAD. Also beyond the pricing, there's
much more on features and functionality front. And obviously we expect lot of
customer interest becoming visible upon arrival of this product.

Are you looking at expanding your channel base to increase your business
to the 'six times' levels you were speaking of earlier? And how do you wish
to go about it?

Our business theme is very clear, which is to basically go deeper with the
strategic accounts and to go broader with the channels. We also want to
aggressively tap the opportunities in the B & C-class markets. One way is to
expand our coverage through existing partners. This will take care of their
ambitions of growth as well as profitability.

We also want to add more partners because we believe that everybody in spite
of their ambitions may not be able to grow the way we want to. So the next stage
is to assess how many more partners we need and identify the same. These
partners can only appointed after a very careful evaluation as have to have the
domain expertise so that they can understand the language of the customers well.

Our criteria also demand the partners to have a pre-sales person on every six
sales person. Then there are evaluations on aspects like qualifications,
training, etc. While our criteria become little tough for anyone to qualify, we
do so to ensure that the customer is serviced well. We also expect our partners
to be able to provide lot of localization support to the customers.

GOLDIE