Time to re-look at business models!

The last one week has seen the world grapple tough economic crunch coming from the United States with the bankruptcy of global giants such as Lehman Brothers even as Merrill Lynch being taken over by Bank of America – ringing warning bells for every company to have a re-look at its existing practices and do this exercise fast. Sunny Pokala, CEO, Amtex Systems speaks about the challenging environment that prevails in an exclusive interview with Prasad Ramasubramanian of CyberMedia News. Excerpts from the interview:

As an entrepreneur running Amtex Systems for the last 11 years, do you feel that the current challenging economic scenario requires a look at the business models of one's company?

It is important for an entrepreneur or any company to re-look at their business models and ensure it is dynamic enough to adapt to the changing market context, at any point of time, irrespective of the current economic scenario. At Amtex Systems, we have emphasised on developing a business model that inculcates ‘change’, right from the beginning.

I believe in having an open mind and the alertness to adapt to changes. We started in 1991 with an onsite consulting practice in the US and have created a strong foothold there ever since, among customers. In fact, it was customer requirements that forced us to set up our offshore development operations in India in 2005 (much later than most other IT companies, if you observe).

We also started work on our IT infrastructure development - the first of its kind plug-n-develop centre on the IT corridor in Siruseri, for some of our clients in US who had such a need. The fact that we began with an onsite consulting model and looked at setting up back-end offshore operations much later has helped.

Our clients today are increasing business with us not only because we can help them cut costs but more so because we have high capabilities and we have a quality consulting practice with years of experience combined with the dual advantage of low costs and quick turnaround time. We continue to evolve our business model and continue to look at opportunities where we can add value and profit from them.

Amtex Systems, like many other IT entities, is a pioneer in the BFSI segment, which is one of the biggest hit in current economic crisis. How is your company faring on the same?

Amtex systems is involved in development of mission critical applications at client sites in the BFSI segment and we have become part of the business process, so we have seen very less impact with the economic changes.

Could you talk to us on the state-of-the-art offshore development facility in Chennai and what differentiates it from such facilities offered by other companies?

As I said earlier, at Amtex we have built upon our offshore centre and added people resources based on client requirements and not vice versa. So, when we hire we know the exact requirement and need to ensure the candidate’s skill sets and job fit is appropriate. This in turn has resulted in us being more focused on high-end and niche development and testing work. In fact, our testing and QA division has been delivering great work for a number of global companies in the last two years and it has grown manifold. We have a strong team today of 100 testing experts and are working on a unique Domain based testing model. We have consciously focused on quality and the kind of work, rather than ramping up and increasing headcount, unlike most others.

Amtex Systems has pioneered in areas such as IT staffing needs, staffing needs, services portfolio, and in the software testing and quality assurance. Could you share with us instances of Amtex playing a pivotal role in solving clients' areas of concern through your expertise?

Since we have consulting expertise and work with multiple clients, we are able to leverage our experiences at multiple client sites and are able to provide our clients a jump start with their problems so that they don’t have to re-invent the wheel. For example, when we were facing the problem of designing a new portfolio tracking system at an investment bank, there were issues with designing the business process but since we had already done the same at another client site, we were able to leverage on our experience, so we could save time and money for the client.

Tough quarters await the bourses, how do you foresee Amtex Systems' performance in the coming quarters?

We have been performing well in the last quarter and have grown at 18 per cent in the last year. With the additional business opportunities that we are looking at, we are confident and are looking at generating 100 m USD in revenue by FY 08-09.