Having received an investment of nearly Rs 10 crore by Kumar Malavallithe Indian born tech evangelist and co-founder of companies like BrocadeApara Enterprise Solutions displayed a strong performance last fiscal, with its balance sheets showing an impressive 55% revenue growth. It recorded Rs 93.25 crore as against Rs 60 crore in 2002-03. Kumar was also inducted as the Chairman of the organization.

Continuing with its original positioning, the company focused on addressing business in the enterprise segment, even at a time when most solution providers were seen scurrying to tap the big SMB opportunity. This combined with the fact that contribution from its service revenues too came down from about 30% to nearly 17% last fiscal, had some amount of telling on its overall profitability. This dip was largely a function of company virtually stopping its Sun-related service business.

BFSI and IT/ITES both contributed 30% each while telcos brought in another 20% of the business. Apara won prestigious projects from customers like TCS, Accenture, Intel, Daimler Chrysler, Robert Bosch and MTNL, with the last one being the most high-value project, wherein the company upgraded the customer's Internet backbone.

It continued to focus on three core technology areas of storage, security and networking, with the first contributing nearly 50% of its overall business. It also signed up with IBM for its Tivoli solutions and undertook quite a few storage consolidation projects. Among other tie-ups, prominent were Bakbone, Tandberg Data, Avaya and Netscaler.

Last year, the company also worked towards tapping segments like oil and gas, energy and e-business.

In terms of manpower, the company increased its headcount by 50% with total employee strength increasing to 120. It also expanded its geographical reach by opening a branch in Bangalore. To make the organization more process-oriented, it also got itself ISO-certified.

However, what really set the company different from its competitive SIs last year was the unique partnership model adopted by it. It started tying up with various smaller solution providers across the country, to further sell the solutions already developed or implemented by the company. Thus ensuring that it could generate additional revenues every time it created a solution for its own customers, by selling the same to other partners looking for similar solution.

Most of the solutions that the company pushed through this model were low-cost, entry-level, and apt to address the business needs of SMB customers. While revenues from this activity is yet to show up significantly on the balance sheet, it does indicate that SMB as a segment is something that Apara can't choose to ignore.

With an eye to address the global market, Apara also got into activities like remote infrastructure management and started with groundwork to work out possible partnership arrangements on foreign shores. It decided to enter into various South-East Asian market by way of MoUs and JVs. Also to enhance its brandshare in the domestic market, it got on to organizing various roadshows in association with its principals like Hitachi Data Systems and Veritas. The company now has set its sights on an IPO in the next three years.

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