40. ALLURED: Allinces

Allied Digital Services has got a new mantra and that is services. Beginning calendar year 2001, the company began focus-ing more on this part of the business. Services contri-bute 15 percent currently to the overall business, which is expected to grow to 20 percent this year. Systems integration contributes ano-ther 35 percent to the current revenue.

However, agency business saw a drop of three percent in 2001-02. The previous year too, its agency revenues dropped by 15 percent. Is this trend expected to continue?

"No," says Nitin Shah, MD. "Last year a lot of corporates were reluctant to invest in IT because of the recession. But IT deployment has started taking off this year, so our agency revenues too are bound to increase," believes he.

This is why Allied invested in a technically sound team by appointing 100 more employees last year. And this investment in skilled personnel helped it bag an $1 million networking order for 2,000 nodes from State Bank of India.

Allied was appointed as the authorized service and repair partner for Apple. It also became a Citrix certified gold partner last year and joined hands with two Isreal-based companies–Orca and Mediagate–for providing video on demand and unified messaging solutions. It became a first-tier partner for Brocade for fiber channel switches and Sitara for bandwidth management solutions. Another first for the company was the tying up as allaince partner for companies like Bangalore Labs and NIIT.