Rajiv Kumar, Managing Director and CEO, Proactive Data Systems talks about the company’s journey so far in the Indian IT sector shedding light on transitions, challenges, changing trends in technology and how to stay in the game in an exclusive with SME Channels.
Proactive Data Systems is a 2-decade old company which has been in the Information Technology business from its inception. Earlier a true blue network infrastructure company, Proactive expanded business three years ago into an end-to-end IT Infrastructure solution business. “Today, we do Servers, Data Centers as well as complete Data Center build-outs,” said Rajiv Kumar, Managing Director & CEO, Proactive Data Systems. The company is a full-fledged IT infrastructure provider offering complete services as per customer requirements.
Proactive is a certified Cisco gold partner and has been associated with Cisco since 2000. With Cisco, Proactive grew from a reseller to a premium partner, a premier select, silver and eventually gold three years ago. Apart from Cisco, Proactive is also a silver partner for EMC, a premier partner for NetApp, partner for VMware, silver partner for Panduit and ComScope. Rajiv added, “We at Proactive cater to a limited number of brands making strong commitment with each of them in terms of partnership, training, experience, building our own labs, etc.”
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“We have the ability to do end to end and partial projects.”
Rajiv Kumar
MD & CEO
Proactive Data Systems
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The transition started about 3 yrs back when the company decided to expand to services. He said, “The growth in the network infrastructure business was flattening out and we had to look for new spaces to cater to our ambitions. The descision to enter IT infrastructure space was a logical one as we already had a large number of our clients who we had to refer somewhere else when it came to IT infrastructure demands.”
“Our primary expansion was into Data Centers. Today, we handle end-to-end IT requirements ranging from servers, build outs, virtualization and turnkey projects with entire data center setup. With our clients and their trust in Proactive, the expansion was a success. The first year into the transition was tough though but there has been rapid growth in the last two years,” he maintained.
For a company like Proactive, which is not into manufacturing or has a product or a brand, its manpower is its core strength. So Proactive takes immense care of its human resources. We have a committed and dedicated team that consistently endeavors to add value to our services. We feel that customers are the prize and advocate a customer oriented approach from top to bottom in the office… day in day out. I believe this is one philosophy that has worked for Proactive,” he quips.
Proactive Data Systems currently employ a 120 strong workforce. Around 1/6th of these are into finance, administration and marketing whereas the rest hundred are technical employees. This shows Proactive’s technical prowess and ambition towards providing top quality products and services.
As IT infrastructure is a new segment, there are consistent updates and new tools and apps which demand an equally consistent retraining of employees. The company trains its employees all the time and have an in-house senior designated executive who is in charge of all the training.
Apart from in-house training facility, the company also ropes in experts from Cisco, EMC and many other vendors to offer training. Rajiv emphasizes, “We have invested a lot to make sure we can train a large number of people including our branch teams simultaneously through video cameras and large video training systems so that the entire offices can get trained and branch offices do not lag behind in technical knowledge.”
Market Scenario
With the recent technological trends, the IT market has become increasingly software and application oriented. As per Rajiv, he is being pushed by OEMs to enter the software business. One fact that cannot be denied is that software has crept into everything. Even the infrastructure business is now heavily software based. One can say that entering the software market isn’t a choice but inevitable in today’s market scenario. Therefore, he is increasing his focus on retraining people to become more software oriented and also hiring new employees to cater to new demands.
Projects, Initiatives and IOT
Proactive Data Systems works both as system integrator and solution provider. Rajiv said, “We have the ability to do both end to end and partial projects. But large-sized projects like smart cities, smart buildings and IOT implementation need extensive collaboration between government and private organizations therefore for us to collaborations has taken a front seat.”
The company has done POCs in surveillance and analytics for Ministry of Defense, GOI and rural education but as far as IOT implementation is concerned, Proactive is at a very early stage.
He added, “We have close interest in education and manufacturing and this will be our main focus. Talking about Cloud and Big Data, even today we are involved in offering cloud based solutions and this will continue.”
Services Business and Growth
Proactive offers its own set of services under the name Pro-care. These services are provided as a wrapping with the Cisco solution. The services constitute to around 24 percent of its growing business and the company plans to take this number to 30 percent.
Talking about growth, Proactive has been stepping on a tremendous growth in the last two years. Rajiv maintains, “Our growth this year was at 65 percent closing Rs.187 crores compared to 45 percent the previous year to at Rs117 crores. Our expectation for next year is a growth of 30-35 percent projecting to cross Rs.220 crores by April’17. The majority of our business is from Cisco having a share of 74 percent. EMC products amount to roughly 6-7 percent whereas structured cabling garners 10-12 percent share. Rest of the revenue is balanced by our other products and services.
Roadmap Ahead
Focusing on growth around security solutions, proactive is projecting a more than double digit growth in coming time and the company has strengthened its team. Rajiv added, “Also, we are focusing on cloud based products like collaboration and video products like Cisco’s Miraki which is already a big hit.”
As per Rajiv, its partner business with Cisco will undoubtedly remain at the helm of its operations. Rajiv said, “We have strengthened our supply chain, invested in ERP, and B2B with Cisco. Most of the market share for Cisco Products is with the main two or three partners. Strengthening our services and offering better turnaround time, we intend to capture market and take business from the prominent partners.”
Asked about what is his advice to the fellow partners, he said, “I can safely say that giving value is pivotal to the channel business. One should constantly aim at giving value to the customers and partners. Partners need to be sensitive to changing trends and should deliver value through adopting newer technologies, expanding portfolio, and moving in sync with the times.”
“From experience I’ve seen that the main problems associated with channels is delivering consistently on quality. Investing in people and systems is crucial. We have seen our investments in people pay off and the same for systems which, however, we realized not at first but eventually, leading to heavy investments to improve operations. Investing in people and systems will ensure that a partner offers the same level of quality every time and to every customer,” he added.
