Veeras Infotek : Meet The Man Of Desire...

Desire! that's the one secret of every man's career. Not education. Not being
born with hidden talents. Desire' so goes the saying by Bobby Unser. For
Sudarsan Ranganathan desire is something he has plenty of. "I am a man of
desire. I have a desire for life, accomplishments, material possessions, peace,
love, happiness. I wake up each day when my desire for waking up is greater than
my desire to sleep," said Sudarsan as a matter of fact.

Sudarsan who is the CEO of Chennai based solution provider Veeras Infotek is
a man of strong beliefs and this translates into his work philosophy. "At Veeras,
everybody is important and yet nobody is important. We also stress on
responsibility and accountability instead of power and authority," said Sudarsan
who also shared some insight on dealing with people, "It is better to explain
why you do what you do so that it leads to participation instead of getting them
to do it through cooperation." Asked on what he would do better at Veeras,
Sudarsan highlighted, "The shift from ideas to execution should happen more
effectively, also I would want to improve the systems to monitor, measure and
review performance and other aspects and of course I would like to be more
efficient by doing more with less.

Ranganathan also detailed some of the things like he constantly likes to
drill into the psyche of his employees. "I tell my people to be extremely
selfish by helping others. I believe you can get everything you want from life
if you can help other people get what they want from life." Sudarsan has also
ensured that job security is not something that Veeras will guarantee to its
employees. "My job as a manager is not to guarantee job security and I don't. On
the other hand my job is to ensure employment security for my workforce," said
Sudarsan.

Sudarsan Ranganathan CEO, Veeras Infotek with his wife and kids

Right from starting Veeras Infotek back in 1992 as a single man business to
growing it to a 140 member organization, Sudarsan has seen it all. "I started
off with a 25 sq. ft. office and today I have about ten thousand sq. ft. of
office space besides having five retail stores branded 'IT@HOME' spread across
Chennai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad. Success even as a word got associated to me
only after I succeeded in business. Today Veeras Infotek has given me a standard
of life as well as quality of life. It has been a great journey of
transformation for me as a person," recalled Sudarsan.

Talking about some of his personality traits, Sudarsan revealed, "My biggest
strength is my resilience. When I am down in the dumps or when I receive
insults; that for me is the greatest source of inspiration. My weakness is that
I often don't pay attention to detail."

Often it is failures that shape one's outlook toward life. Sudarsan recounted
one of Veeras' major failures. "Three years ago, I was bored with our steady
growth and wanted to have geometric growth and to achieve that I hired
additional people, set up more branches in places like Pune and Coimbatore and
expanded our functional domain offering to include ERP systems and bespoke
application development. I got a separate product management and pre-sales team
in place but we lacked in executing the ideas and subsequently lost out to a
huge increase in costs. That year was one of the biggest years of failure for
Veeras and maybe the only year when we suffered losses in our history,"
reminisced Sudarsan.

Sudarsan's family consists of his wife Rekha and two sons, Sarvajith and
Sathvick. Rekha works as a child birth educator, lactation consultant and
psychologist. Sarvajith who is the older of the two studies in sixth grade and
is a cricket enthusiast who also captains his coaching team.

Sathvick studies in fourth grade and is a chess buff. Incidentally, Sathvick
is ranked fifth in the state in the under-seven chess players' category.
Sudarsan shared how he spends his leisure time. "My children are my relaxation
and on the busiest, stressed out days, I go back home and spend time with the
kids. Besides this, I find playing badminton and taking a walk with my wife also
relaxing. As a family we make it a point to also holiday in one destination
abroad as well as in India every year," commented Sudarsan.

Finally, Sudarsan shared some of the goals for Veeras in the coming year as
well as areas to grow into. "We would like to increase our focus on SaaS,
becoming a managed services partner for infrastructure services and also expand
our retail presence. Ultimately, our aim is to be the number one company in
virtualization of storage, servers and desktops. We also want to be the number
one infrastructure software solutions company in the country," signed off
Sudarsan.

John Jacob

johnj@cybermedia.co.in