M S Sidhu

Apara Enterprise Solutions, a high-end IT infrastructure solutions and services company, offering storage, security and networking, plans to boost its revenues and become a Rs 100 crore company in the current fiscal. Unlike Ramco or Datacraft who specialise in a particular vertical or solutions, Apara offers end-to-end solutions in storage, security and networking.

M S Sidhu, Apara’s managing director, said, “The market we operate in is worth Rs 3,000 crore. We realised that we need to change our strategy to meet the new requirements of enterprises.” In recent months, Apara has garnered some of the biggest security deals in the country, including Reliance, Bharti and AT&T and has also won the data centre projects in India for GE Capital Services and VSNL. ABN Amro Bank is a customer of Apara for SAN. All these deals are worth Rs 2-3 crore on an average.

Sidhu said, “We are moving away from being a product-centric solution provider to a customised solutions provider with a strong focus on disaster recovery (DR) and business continuance (BC) catering to BPO, call centres, banks and telecom. In the intelligent networking space Rediff, Indiatimes, NetMagic, Reliance and VSNL are using solutions ranging from SSL security, bandwidth management, load balancing and failover.”

This year Apara’s focus will be on emerging markets like manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, healthcare and insurance, in addition to its presence in the telecom and banking segments. The company also wants to expand its market outside India in the APAC and Middle East regions. “We have signed an MoU in Korea and are looking at entering Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Thailand through JVs and MoUs. We are open to the idea of having our own subsidiary. But it will take some time as we are still evaluating these markets,” says Sidhu.

“Our strategy is to form new alliances with application software vendors for the enterprise market. We have formed alliances with vendors like Oracle and SAP. This year a lot of emphasis is on increasing our service offerings. We are planning to offer professional and managed security services in the current year. These are expected to generate revenues worth Rs 30 crore in 2002-2003,” he added.

Apara has also formed an alliance for high-end storage solutions with Hitachi Data Systems, Juniper Networks and Nortel Networks for networking solutions and Peribit Networks for bandwidth management solutions. Currently Wipro Technologies is using a Peribit Networks bandwidth management solution while ICICI Bank is in talks for a similar deal with Apara.

Apara is planning to increase its head count from 60 to 130 by March 2003. The new recruits will be responsible for professional services, consulting and support. By March 2004 the company plans to expand its head count to 500.
Sidhu said, “We have ongoing projects ranging in value from Rs 1 crore to Rs 5 crore. The bulk of Apara’s revenues come from storage, networking and security solutions.”