A surprising piece of news jolted the Asia Pacific IT industry watchers in April this year. HCL Technologies, one of India's top IT services company, had lost its president and Asia Pacific region head, Virender Aggarwal.
Aggarwal had steered HCL's business quite effectively in the last three years in the region (he had joined HCL Technologies on 1 May 2009). During his time, HCL's growth in the region was spectacular (60 percent year-on-year growth, for instance). It became the fastest growing region for HCL. He started many new initiatives in Singapore including the HCL Mobility Lab and the Lilly HCL Co-innovation Lab. Why then did he leave HCL Technologies? And most importantly, where was he headed now?
For sometime, no one had an answer to this question.
Contrary to his soft-spoken image, Aggarwal had made a similar sensational exit in 2009 from Satyam after the company's chairman B. Ramalinga Raju confessed of falsifying the accounts of the company to the tune of US$1 billion. This must have been a hard decision for him. After all, he was instrumental in consolidating the fragmented AP market for Satyam. He founded the company's regional headquarters in Singapore. And how did he start? He had started off with a staff of three people in Singapore in 2000, and went on to scale up the business into 15 development centres and 33 sales offices across 20 countries with over 4,000 employees.
So, where was this remarkable technology leader going now? Had he been poached by one of the biggies-TCS or Infosys?
The suspense lasted for two weeks.
Curtains from the mystery of Aggarwal's next move were lifted on May 9 this year. Turned out that the fellow had now not made a lateral move to another IT services giant. He had quietly joined a relatively new company (though it is part of a big business group) as its CEO.
The company he joined is enterprise software provider Ramco Systems, the home-grown business software maker which is part of Chennai-based conglomerate Ramco Group. The billion dollar group has interests in textiles and cement, and software was, perhaps, an afterthought.
When I recently met Aggarwal over lunch at a restaurant in Singapore, my first question to him was-and you might have guessed it-why did he chuck HCL Technologies for Ramco Systems? What was so compelling about this little known company?
Aggarwal's answer was without any drama. "I have been in the outsourcing business for a long time and it had become a 'routine business' for me," he said.
OK, that makes sense. But give me more, I thought.
Aggarwal felt that new, disruptive technologies were changing the IT landscape. "I thought, let me be a part of this change," he said. "Going forward, companies will consume IT, not produce it."
On his appointment, Ramco System had announced that Aggarwal, with his vast experience in the IT field, would help position Ramco as a strong player for enterprise solutions on the cloud.
So Aggarwal had been hired for a clear-cut mission, but more on this a little later.
As he worked through his chapali kebab and dal, Aggarwal quickly dived into providing me his new company's details: that it started as an R & D division of Ramco Industries Limited in 1992, and that later it branched off as an independent company in 1999.
Headquartered in Chennai, the company has 15 offices spread across India, Asia Pacific, US, Canada, Europe, Middle East and Africa. It is a public listed company in India and has more than 1,800 employees. According to the company's website, Ramco has over 140,000 users from 950+ customer organisations, globally since its inception. The company provides solutions to multiple verticals including banking, insurance, manufacturing, supply chain, aviation, transportation and logistics, healthcare, governance, and retail.
The company's strength, Aggarwal told me, lies in its enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. It runs payroll for several Fortune 500 companies in 48 countries worldwide. Its software is hugely popular in aviation sector-35 percent of the world's helicopters use Ramco's software for maintenance. The company boasts of clients like GoAir (a budget airline company) and GMR Aviation (private jet services provider) in India and Malaysian Airlines in Malaysia.
According to Aggarwal, research is the heart and soul of Ramco Systems. "The company is very R&D focused," he said. "We have been working closely with IIT Madras. Out of 1700 employees, we have about 1,000 people in R&D." The company has 12 approved patents.
So far, Ramco systems had been selling their ERP product directly to customers, said Aggarwal. Now he wants to put this piece of software on steroids-by going global via the cloud. And soon they will stop selling on-premise version of the software.
For this, the company is making available its enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution on Amazon Web Services (AWS). "By pushing the software into the Amazon cloud, Ramco's ERP solution will be available globally," Aggarwal said.
Ramco's ERP on cloud provides functionalities such as supply chain management, customer resource management, financial management and built-in analytics.
Aggarwal said that the on-cloud offering will allow companies to grow their business without worrying about infrastructure resources or incurring any capital expenses. "We have a compelling payment model: pay as you use and there is no upfront licence cost," he said. "Our cloud implementation fee is much lower compared to others and we provide free updates."
The reason why they chose Amazon is that Amazon has presence almost everywhere in the world. "Our cloud runs from India, US and Singapore," he said.
Aggarwal said that Ramco's ERP on cloud is not only cheaper than other service providers, it was also unique because its "engine is not heavy" and it can "run off an iPad". "There is no other product that runs on an iPad," he said.
He said that Ramco's ERP on cloud model is already tried and tested in India and has been quite successful at the home turf. Ramco started offering cloud ERP four years ago in India and today has 3,000 SMB customers in the country. "We are now focusing more on larger companies," he said.
After joining Ramco, Aggarwal is not only globalising the business, he is also going in for a partnership model which is new for the company. The company has forged partnerships with Dell, NIIT, TCS and Infosys, and it is in negotiation with some more companies in the region for partnerships.
The company is making steady progress in its globalisation effort. Apart from having offices in Singapore and the US, the company is opening offices in the UK, Australia and Switzerland. It is setting up operations in Melbourne to launch its ERP on Cloud, Analytics, Government and Enterprise Asset Management Solution in Australia and New Zealand, focusing on the medium to large enterprises and state governments. In October, the company announced that it has forged a partnership with an Indonesian IT systems integrator Multipolar Technology as part of its efforts to expand in the Asia Pacific region.
Looking at Aggarwal's track record, it can be safely predicted that Ramco Systems is in for a great ride under his leadership.