BANGALORE, INDIA: He started from a networking company (Nortel Networks), went on to co-found a couple of companies (Bangalore Labs and Quintant Services), made greener plans with his Cicada eco-tourism venture, and dreamt of a bright 'LED' (Vignani Technologies) future for India.

Meet T G Ramesh, more famously known as Tiger Ramesh.

After a 11-year stint in the entrepreneurial arena, Tiger is now set to try his hands in the corporate world.

Appointed the CEO of CSS Corp in July 2011, Tiger Ramesh in an interview with Srinivas Rasoor and Deepa Damodaran of CIOL, opens up about his first experience in the corporate world and his plans for the company. Excerpts:

CIOL: What made you to join CSS?

T G Ramesh: It is a nice sized company. Last year we were roughly about $125 million and this year we will be about $165-$170 million company.

The first reason is that it is growing pretty well and operates in a very niche space. A bulk of our business comes from technology BPOs.

The second reason is that a lot of action is happening in the market. Today, companies that are selling technology products, who are our customers, are growing in non-English speaking markets.

Look at the way smartphones are evolving from Asia Pacific market and companies such as Samsung, HTC, Huawei are taking on the likes of iPhones and others.

Products that are developed in non-English market are sold in English-speaking markets. From our customer perspective, market sizes are becoming very big and so from a technology support perspective we see a large opportunity, globally.

We already have a critical mass and see the next step of growth clearly happening before us. Therefore,  it is an interesting time to join a company like CSS and take it to the next stage.

CIOL: So which are these newer markets that you are looking into?

Ramesh: Today large telecom and networking companies are expanding into non-English speaking markets. So, we are also looking to go forward and give technology support in languages other than English.

Chinese, Japanese and Korean form one sector of the market that we are looking into.

The other area which is growing is the Arabic speaking Middle East – UAE, Saudi Arabia – and North Africa - Lebanon, Libya, Egypt, Istanbul. We see a lot of companies investing in infrastructure in these countries.

The third important market is Northern Europe, the Nordic belt, including Denmark and Sweden.

The fourth is the Spanish speaking market, including Central America, Latin America, South America, Spain and Portugal and also the Spanish-speaking communities within the US.

We are trying to align ourselves where our customers are seeing growth, as delivery partner to provide services.

CIOL: If we look at T G Ramesh, he was with Nortel, then started Bangalore Labs, then Quintant and then Cicada, which were all entrepreneurial ventures and then this sudden move to CSS. Why?

Ramesh: I have been an entrepreneur for 11 years, where I faced some failures, and some success. However, I am very happy with these experiences as I got to learn a lot.

How many people get this opportunity to take these learnings to the corporate world and apply it there?

Though CSS is a large company and has its own funding, investors and a strong board, I still behave like an entrepreneur here. The combination of corporate and entrepreneur gives a different canvas for painting.

CIOL: Will you be bringing Cicada, Quintant, Bangalore Labs kind of businesses to CSS?

Ramesh: At Quintant, me and Phanish Murthy had to compete with large Tier-1 IT companies and that forced us to become very innovative. That is how our business service positioning and transaction-based pricing model came into being. These are some of the instincts which we cultivated to take on the bigger companies.

And it is the same instinct which we are trying to implement in CSS today in order to take it to the next level. Otherwise, how can we grow from $170 million to $300-$400 million in next five years?

Organic growth is one way of achieving this. Today we are growing a little better than the industry rate.

However, in order to achieve multiple-fold growth, we as a company need to innovate and this is what we are trying to do at CSS.

We are trying to come up with service models, which will change the way we do business and have the probability to improve our profitability.

Transaction-based pricing model is one of the learning we are trying to bring in to CSS, whereas others are still talking about FT-based pricing models.

Another learning that we are trying to implement is, as a start-up one tries to create value by building own IP. Similarly at CSS, we are trying to create IP in select areas such as mobility and cloud computing.

CIOL: Are you looking at India as a market?

Ramesh: Definitely, yes. India is a market that nobody can ignore now. Every large company has BRICS strategy and India occupies a central position in it and so is a key market for us.

India is a very price sensitive and demanding market. It is only in the last few years that Indian has become a services market. In the late 90s and early 2000s, it was a product market, which was more into system integration, insulation commissioning etc. However, today India has gone global because Indian companies  have developed a service mindset.

Today, there are Tier 1 IT companies, which  have a very clear India strategy. Then there are small home grown Indian IT companies, which are solely focused on India and there are also several global companies, which are focusing on India.

So, one has to be very careful with what to do in this country and need to pick and choose what is niche for them.

We are looking at two to three areas. One is telecom. This space is growing rapidly in India. The third generation telecom technology was recently launched and it is only a matter of time before India will move on to 4G.

CSS is very strong when it comes to 3G and 4G. Eighteen months back we acquired a company in the US called Glow Networks, which is focused only on telecoms sector. It is now a carrier division of CSS.

We work with large telcos and help them do radio engineering for 4G, i e WiMAX, LTE, and also do optical switching.

So far, these were limited only to the US, however, now, we are bringing it to India and other Asian markets as well.

Moreover, today Indian telecoms industry is also moving into other markets. So we see a prospect for us as well, since these carriers will need to implement and roll out technology and so need technology support and service.

Also, the technology support business that we provide to our global customers needs to be optimised for utilisation. We have a couple of thousands of seats vacant during day, i e morning to evening. We want to bring them to the Indian market. This is an investment that we have already made, we will be looking into the means to leverage more to it.

Another is with regard to our tech support. The Indian IT consumer market is growing at a fast pace. Today people walk into retail outlets and buy WiFi router, or switch to other networking products for home.

Today, many houses have small network of their own, where a printer, a computer, gaming gadgets are connected to a WiFi network. So we are seeing a huge growing base for technology support for home users.

We are currently doing it in the US and Germany, and will be bringing it to India.

The fourth area is enterprise management. We have enterprise wide management solution, which enable enterprises to implement traditional management solutions.  We also want to get into the consulting and implementation piece in this space.

We will be going behind large organizations and help them define and implement a framework solution and then pick up the downstream activity and provide 24x7 support. Right now we are constituting a team for this. 

CIOL: CSS also has a remote infrastructure management portfolio. So what are your plans for this?

Ramesh: Eighteen months back we acquired a platform from an US company called Inteq, which provides remote infrastructure management services (RIMS).

We are currently using this platform to provide RIMS to customers in Europe and the US. We will potentially take that to India, along with the plan to do enterprise platform management implementation and 24x7 technology support.

CIOL: So when you plan to make your company public in the next two years, what is the kind of turnover that you are looking at?

Ramesh: What is more important for a company to go for IPO is profitability than the size.

Retail investors, whom you expect to come and trade in your share in a public market have to be  attracted.

A decent number would be Rs.. 1000 crore of revenue and a continuous track record of profitability, quarter after quarter, and do some interesting stuff. That is why we are saying that in 18 to 24 months we will be ready for that because continuous quarters of growth, new services and geographies will make us interesting.

CIOL: Where do you see the revenue coming from?

Ramesh: It will come from two to three areas. Three businesses came together to form CSS. They were Cybernet, which was into software development, Ready Test Go, which was into into testing and Slashsupport, which was into services.

Support services revenue will come from new language areas, along with the existing customers.

The RIM business, both international and India, is a growth engine. Most of the RIMS business will come from cloud. Most of our customers have infrastructure management strategy in place and are now looking at leveraging cloud, i e , infrastructure management on a SaaS model. And so they are looking for infrastructure management services around cloud. We work with large cloud players such as Amazon.

The third area where we are very strong is development and testing. We do software and outsourced product development and also independent validation and testing.

We see development and testing space growth driven by mobility.

With the splurge of tablets, smartphones e-commerce is giving way to mobile e-commerce. Companies are today looking at mobile e-commerce.

CSS has developed a framework which will help customers a mobile e-commerce platform in weeks and not months.