Trendsetters

It was an evening that celebrated the endeavors of solution providers across
the country. The third DQ Channels Excellence Awards were given away during the
Solution Providers (SP) Summit in Port Blair, Andaman on January 19, 2008. The
event saw partners from across the country being felicitated for various
initiatives they had undertaken during the last fiscal.

The event began with Princy Bhatnagar, Director-New Office Group, Xerox India
making a presentation about his company, underlining that Xerox is not a copier
company anymore. Given Xerox's huge product portfolio, he urged partners to take
the opportunity to grow with Xerox and maintained that Xerox would continue to
leverage on its partners to expand its footprint across the country. “I also
want to reaffirm that unlike a few years ago we do 98 percent through the
channel today, which shows how serious we are about working closely with
partners,” he added.

The first set of awards was a special Jury's Award, and Locuz Enterprise
Solutions from Hyderabad bagged it. The company won this recognition for its
INCOIS tsunami prediction project, which will ensure that the moment a storm
builds up on Indian coasts an alert will reach all coastal agencies and they get
a good half hour to launch evacuation procedures. While accepting his award from
Bhatnagar, Durganadh K Venkata, VP-Business Development and Operations, Locuz
thanked the Indian government and his team for making it possible for getting
this recognition.

The runner-up for the 'Fastest Growing SP' trophy was Bangalore-based
Valuepoint Systems, which registered a growth of 30 percent and has been
maintaining a three-digit growth rate for the past two fiscals. Accepting the
award from Sandeep Nair, MD, Emerson Network Power India, the usually reticent
RS Shanbhag, Director, Valuepoint Systems thanked DQ Channels and said that his
attendance to the SP Summit had become mandatory and was part of his annual
calendar.

The winner in the category was Visesh Infotecnics, which posted revenues of
Rs 110.33 crore in the last fiscal, up from Rs 79 crore in 2005-06, making it
the natural claimant for this trophy. While accepting his award Sanjiv Bhavnani,
CEO, Visesh Infotecnics thanked DQ Channels for the recognition and making him
so popular and jocularly asked the photographer to click good pictures that
could be used in the future issues of the magazine!

The next category of awards was given to the solution partners who have a
widespread service network in the country. The runner-up for the 'Best Service
Provider' category was PC Solutions who's CEO Devendra Taneja had flown his
family to Havelock Island and then made it straight to the DQ Channels SP
Summit. He modestly thanked his team while receiving the award, stating that he
was actually taking this trophy on behalf of his staff.

The winner in this category was Accel Frontline, which has continued to
engage itself in providing comprehensive IT services for enterprises. This
included IT infrastructure management, software services, infrastructure
solutions and IT outsourcing. TO Asokan received the award from Mukesh Gupta,
Director, AOC and said that winning this award has instilled the fire within
Accel to keep bagging it every year.

The next set of awards for the 'Best Deployment' was given to partners who
have implemented complex and unique solutions. The runner-up in this category
was Ontrack Solutions, which did a complex 20 Tivoli implementation and G
Balakrishnan received the award from Sudhir Nayar, Director-Partner Sales, Sun
Microsystems. Bala, as he is fondly called, said that achieving this award was
the best start for his year.

The winner in this category was New Delhi-based Team Computers who had to
deploy a data analytical project, which has been deployed at Fullerton and
Citibank. This same data analytics and reporting tool also helped Reliance Life
Insurance analyze a vast data and penetrate into the profitable sources. While
receiving his award, Ranjan Chopra of Team Computers thanked DQ Channels for the
recognition. “On this occasion I wish to say that the SP Summit has brought us
partners closer to each other. I have a couple of suggestions for the next
year's event which I will share with the people in the magazine,” said Chopra,
amidst laughter.

The runner-up for the 'Most Comprehensive Solution Provider' was Ashtech
Infotech, which has added every leading IT brand to its portfolio and has
managed to offer vast spectrum of solutions, be it computing, which includes
mobile computing, storage, security, back-up/recovery, enterprise systems
management, and services, which include infrastructure management, technology
consulting. Accepting his trophy from Shyam Malhotra, Editor-in-Chief, DQ
Channels, Saurin Shah of Ashtech Infotech remarked that he himself did not know
that his company had so many business divisions!

The winner in this category was Bangalore-based Frontier Business Systems
which added new offerings like security consulting and certification and started
a new services division, while successfully launching the ITIL training and
certification in both Bangalore as well as Chennai. Ravi Verdes, received the
award and mentioned that he was looking forward to bagging more such awards in
the future too.

The most coveted set of awards was the 'Most Successful Solution Provider'
and the runner-up was Allied Digital Services which had some new tie ups last
fiscal with some vendors like Echelon for intelligent building management
system, Epicor for enterprise resource planning and Verint for IP video
surveillance and video analytics solutions for physical security. Bimal Raj,
CEO, Allied Digital Services received the award from Pradeep Gupta, CMD,
CyberMedia India and said, “This awards is truly precious because it adds a lot
of value and credibility to solutions providers like us when we go out to the
market.”

The maharaja of the evening was Ranjan Chopra of Team Computers, which bagged
the crowning glory of the 'Most Successful Solution Provider'. Elated on this
achievement, Chopra thanked all who made this possible and vowed to keep bagging
this trophy year after year. The evening saw partners vying with each other to
belt out songs on the karaoke system and score perfect marks. Suresh Ramani of
Mumbai-based Tech Gyan and his group of fellow singers managed to score the
highest scores of 100 twice. The bonhomie and camaraderie at the event made it
hard to believe that a lot of these 100 solution providers were also competitors
in business.

Methodology for the awards

DQ Channels brings together a panel of vendor company representatives and
business managers from distribution houses and gives them the various parameters
for judging contenders for the awards. The jury then decides who the right
recipients for the various award categories are, while DQ Channels remains a
neutral agency.

Most Successful SP: Team Computers

A Consistent Winner

Following best-laid plans and focusing on keeping customers and employees
content ensured that Team won this award, for the second year in a row

Team Computers has proved it again that to become a successful SP, a company
need to focus on all the factors that are important to make the customers as
well as the employees contented with the organization. It has smartly followed
some well-laid strategies that are directed towards this objective and has
already designed the goals for the coming year so that it always stand as a
front runner in the market. The company clocked the turnover of Rs 175 crore in
the year 2006-07, marking a hike from the previous years' stand at Rs 135 crore.
Team has been following the policy of providing 'solution in a box' that
includes objective to provide business application that are easy to implement
and use for the end-customers. Moving towards this objective, the company has
also launched some applications designed to make the solution simple yet
effective for customers.

Few of these include NaviQlik, which is a readymade plug-n-play data
analytics for Navision users. Other application includes Qlik2Collet that has
been designed for collection agencies for analytics.

Understanding the issue of serious concern over the HR policies and human
retention technology, Team designed application called 'HR in a box' that uses
an engine to convert business rules into applications with extensive coding to
suit the HR practices of customers.

Ranjan Chopra accepting the trophy from Pradeep Gupta, CMD, CyberMedia India for the 'Most Successful Solution Provider'

Ruling the roost

Team has been enjoying a good market position across the country, and a
major portion of the revenue has been coming from North India followed by the
western region. As part of its upcoming strategies, the preference has been set
for polishing its services, especially in the circumference of application
support and remote support. The saga of this company's success is incomplete
without any mention of its new alliances and ventures. In order to have wider
market reach and to match the footsteps with that of global companies, Team took
some important steps on global perspective that have been very strategic to add
glory in the crown.

Last year, it spread its wings globally and incorporated its US office under
the aegis of Team Business Solutions LLC. The company made some important
decisions in terms of business developments for its new venture in the US like
it valued business intelligence and flexible process automation toward
implementing continuously improving business performance management for the
organizations across the globe.

To keep up the flag as a successful SP in the country, Team has remained
flexible in its operations and has been making business directly as well as
through its partners to bring specific solutions to chosen verticals/platforms.

One of the elements that make a company successful or unsuccessful in real
terms is its human resources policy and retention rate. Team has achieved a high
score in both these aspects as it follows a transparent HR policy that is
focused to give equal opportunities to its manpower to prove their caliber and
achieve the best.

Most Successful SP (Runner-up) : Allied Digital Services

A Head Start On IPO

Allied Digital Services has the distinction of setting a precedent amongst
solution providers who always aspired to go public. It also had a busy time last
year receiving awards from publications and vendors, while working hard to
maintain its growth at 44 percent

During last year's Excellence Awards, Allied Digital Services had bagged the
award for 'Most Comprehensive Solution Provider'. This time around, it excelled
itself and was awarded the runner-up trophy for the 'Most Successful Solution
Provider'.

The highlight for Allied Digital last year was its successful initial public
offering in July when it was listed on National Stock Exchange with 75 percent
premium at Rs 332.50 as against issue price of Rs 190 per share.

Allied posted the second highest growth amongst the 50 solution providers
profiled in DQ Channels Silver Club at 44 percent. Its revenue for 2006-07 was
Rs 156 crore, while it stood at Rs 88 crore the year before.

Allied Digital expanded its countrywide coverage from 72 locations to 92
locations. An additional 422 employees were recruited into the organization in
the technical support, sales, marketing and middle management area.

Bimal Raj of Allied Digital Services receiving the runner-up trophy for 'Most Successful Solution Provider' from Pradeep Gupta, CMD, CyberMedia India

Last fiscal, Allied Digital also opened an office in Sydney, Australia to tap
the business potential there. It won several accolades in 2006-07 including an
award from DQ Channels as 'Most Comprehensive Solution Provider' and 'Best
Systems Integrator' by The DQ Week.

Chief among the projects bagged by Allied Digital was the SAP Infrastructure
Solution deployed by it for 22,000 SAPs using open source operating system. This
was India's first large scale SAP deployment on a Linux platform.

Besides this, Allied Digital also deployed the asset management and endpoint
security solution for over 45,000 users for the ICICI Group. According to Allied
Digital, this is the largest deployment of asset management and endpoint
security solution in APAC using LANDesk Management Suite. Apart from these two
contracts, Allied Digital won the IT infrastructure management and IT
outsourcing contract for five years for Otis Elevators.

The year 2006-07 saw Allied Digital tying up with some vendors like Echelon
for intelligent building management system, Epicor for enterprise resource
planning and Verint for IP video surveillance and video analytics solutions for
physical security. It also tied-up with e-Cop to assist in the setup of e-Cop's
security operations center in India through its managed security services.

The company has got growth plans between 70 to 100 percent in topline and
bottomline, respectively. Last fiscal, Allied Digital also entered into an
agreement with Bennett, Coleman & Co Ltd (BCCL).

On its agenda for this fiscal is setting up 35,000 sq ft new corporate office
in Mumbai and the expansion of its warehousing space across the existing 12
locations. It intends to go international and open offices in New York, London
and Bangkok.

Best Service Provider: Accel Frontline

At The Forefront Of Progress

Providing comprehensive customer solutions while putting in place some
much-needed measures to keep its employees satisfied has contributed to the
success of Accel Frontline, which stands tall as the top service providers in
South India

Accel Frontline from Chennai was the winner for the 'Best Service Provider'
trophy at the third DQ Channels Excellence awards. TO Asokan, Country
Manager-Services, Accel Frontline accepted the award from Mukesh Gupta,
Director, AOC and said that winning this award had instilled the fire in Accel
to keep bagging it every year. Accel Frontline, one of the top solution provider
companies of the South is headed by NR Panicker, and in the last fiscal evolved
from a systems integrator to becoming a solution provider of end-to-end IT
solutions. The year went by with Accel getting many new contracts. Significant
among them were the Rs 5.4 crore contract that the company bagged from the
Indian Railways through CRIS to deploy about 300 ticket vending machines; and
projects from the State Bank of India worth Rs 16 crore, Ericsson worth Rs 14.7
crore and Alcatel worth Rs 9 crore.

The company also deepened its presence into the ERP space last fiscal.
Employing 2,615 professionals and operating from 100 locations, the company came
out with its IPO in Oct 2006 and got listed on the National Stock Exchange (NSE)
of India and the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE). The company had a turnover of Rs
220 crore for the FY ending March 2007.

TO Asokan of Accel Frontline receiving the trophy for 'Best Service Provider' from Mukesh Gupta, Director, AOC

Accel Frontline has over the years continued to engage itself in providing
comprehensive IT services for enterprises, which includes IT infrastructure
manage­ment, software services, infras­tructure solutions and IT outsourcing.
Accel is also an enterprise service provider for SUN products and solutions. The
entire service operations are mapped to ISO 9001:2000 quality standards and
service support/service delivery is aligned to ITIL framework.

Some of its latest customer acquisi­tions are MRF Tyres, Hindutan
Petrochemicals, Oil and Natural Gas Commission, Punj Lloyd, Ericson,
Southerland, Aricent to name a few.

Accel Frontline has around 2,000 engineers in its team, which operates from
10 regional offices, 30 area offices and covers close to 100 locations across
India. One of Accel's significant achievements is that indicated a fairly high
employee satisfaction score. A list of skill-sets is maintained by HR which is
constantly upgraded. Doing what it does for both employees and customers, Accel
is surely standing at the forefront of progress and growth.

Best Service provider (Runner-up): PC Solutions

Where Service Is A Religion

Exploiting newer areas of technologies including server, storage and
application virtualization helped Delhi-based PC Solutions gain major MNC
clients, and it wants to keep this momentum going

There are a number of reasons why Delhi-based PC Solutions clinched the
runner-up DQ Channels Excellence award for the Best Service Provider. In the
first place the company concentrated on their service capabilities revolving
around system integration, providing technology solutions and running, managing
and administering total IT infrastructure for organizations of global scale on
defined SLA basis.

In addition to this, it also ventured into newer areas of technologies
including server, storage and application virtualization. This thus helped them
clock a turnover of Rs 141 crore in 2006-07 compared to Rs 126 crore in 2005-06.

Services has always been PC Solutions' forte. Having embarked as a service
company in 1988, when the company felt that maintenance has started becoming
redundant, it stopped focusing only on maintenance services and migrated its
customers to SLA-driven facility management services in 1992. Thus the company
now focuses on making their client's business processes continuous.

As part of their service offering, PC Solutions offers basic infrastructure
service, information security solutions, develops IT solutions inline with
business requirements, deploys special business projects on need basis and
offers IT solutions for overseas clients. In addition it also provides IT
trainings on different OEM curriculum.

Devendra Taneja receiving the runner-up trophy for 'Best Service Provider' from Mukesh Gupta, Director, AOC

Several projects in a year

Last fiscal, PC Solutions completed almost 45 projects, a clear signal of
the fact that the coming year will see them offer even better services. Among
the major projects deployed, the company helped a globally established telecom
software giant in migrating from Linux mailing system to Exchange 2007 with two
physical locations in New Delhi and Bangalore. It also had a global
implementation for all marketing offices worldwide. This Rs 1.20 crore worth
project was implemented with zero downtime and the company's project team was
awarded by the customer as Star Team and even went to the extent of bagging
'Project of the Year' award from them.

In keeping with the tradition of focusing on its services, providing business
applications for certain segments is the next thrust area for the company. This
segment will see higher investment from the company's end vis-à-vis what they
have been doing so far. Currently the company is in the process of identifying
the business verticals and segments where they would lay the thrust and in
accordance with the same, PC Solutions will establish newer business application
technology penetration in those areas. RFID adoption is another area where the
company thinks that businesses are lacking and will give due importance to the
same, in terms of skill pool, in creating internal pilots etc.

It's the bottomline where the company lays much emphasis because for PC
Solutions achieving targets at topline has always been relatively easier.
Keeping the above factor in mind, the company has planned to triple its
bottomline contributions, which will be close to Rs 25 crore.

Best project Deployment: Team Computers

Making Sense Of Vast Data

Team Computers won the DQ Channels Excellence Award under the category of
Best Deployment for a data analytical project that it deployed for Fullerton
India Credit Company Ltd and Citibank

The data analytical project for which Team Computers bagged the DQ Channels
Excellence award for 'Best Project Deployment' has been deployed for nine
dashboards or under nine different segments of Fullerton India Credit Company.
Some of these dashboards include business area, finance management, branch
management, branch performance management, branding management and call
management.

In Citibank, the project was deployed for their retail banking, finance
management, everyday track of transaction and ATM analysis, loan billing,
deposits, foreign exchange, non-refundable finances, liability management, cash
transfer management, compliances report, calendar of returns and kind of
returns.

Under each segment, complete analysis of the entire elements were tracked
like rate of interests, age of customer, amount transacted, deposit, average
balance, cost of deposit, debits, VIP customers, DMAT account and number of new
customers.

The implementation of the project involved a lot of database understanding
and application of the right methodology that could break down the complicated
data and made it effective and convenient for the business users. This is an
ongoing process and it demands a lot of data accumulation and easy
implementation of the records, so that it could be utilized optimally.

Ranjan Chopra of Team Computers receiving the trophy for 'Best Project Deployment' from Sudhir Nayar, Director-Partner Sales, Sun Microsystems

Challenges along the way

One of the major challenges that Team dealt with while deploying the project
was the huge size of the database. While sharing one of the incidents that
happened during the implementation at Fullerton, Team Computer's project manager
narrated that after doing an analysis of the client requirement, Team had asked
for server requirement of 8GB RAM. But when the actual implementation took
place, the size of RAM went up to as high as 28GB.

While implementing the project in Citibank also, Team had a tough time, while
loading the services, as the size of data was extremely high. This took a lot of
understanding and patience to acquire the desired result because as many as
1,000 transactions take place in one single day. The project team found
Fullerton to be more challenging as users were widely scattered and it took a
lot of planning to execute the service within the time period.

The data analytical project at Fullerton involved the deployment of five Team
employees including one project manager, one solution architect and three
developers for the entire implementation and three for Citibank including one
project manager and two developers. Both are ongoing project as the services are
provided consistently, as per client needs. After the implementation of the data
analytical project, Fullerton is today serving around 2,500 users while Citibank
is serving nine users.

Best project Deployment (Runner-up): Ontrack Solutions

A Unique Project

Though not at liberty to reveal the name of its client, Ontrack Solutions
was a worthy contender for the Best Deployment Award, where its deployment of a
Tivoli solution offered manifold benefits to its clients

While selecting the runner-up under the category for Best Project Deployment,
the jurywas seeking partners who have implemented complex and unique solutions.
Their immediate choice was Mumbai-based Ontrack Solutions that did a 20 Tivoli
implementation. Incidentally, Ontrack also had the honor of receiving an
Asia-Pacific Business Partner Excellence award from IBM and the Highest
Contributing Business Partner for IBM Software-Tivoli Award from the same
company for its Tivoli implementation.

Ontrack has expertise in this technology arena courtesy its Professional
Services Group that looks after the implementation of all Tivoli and related
products. The company has a very good installed base for Tivoli Storage in
western India with clients who are corporate and multi-national companies.

G Balakrishnan of Ontrack Solutions receving the runner-up trophy for 'Best Project Deployment' from Sudhir Nayar, Director-Partner Sales, Sun Microsystems

In order to accomplish this, Ontrack has suitably trained and certified
manpower for carrying out Tivoli implementations, specifically in heavy-duty
storage environments. Its expertise includes designing and implementing products
like Tivoli Storage Manager, Tivoli Automation and Tivoli Security.

What was unique about its award-winning project was that it could provide a
detailed scope of work of implementation to the customer, who did not wish to be
named. The initial implementation was done on a User Acceptance Test Server and
then it was deployed in a live environment. Once the project was successfully
implemented in another live set-up, Ontrack provided documentation and training
to the key users. Ontrack faced some challenges at the initial level while
understanding the setup and correlating the solution to the customer's
environment. Whenever there was a need from the customer or the company
generated the requirement, Ontrack had to ensure that it progressed with planned
activity.

These activities included understanding some basic points like the customer's
business, his existing IT infrastructure and his pain areas. After understanding
these client needs, Ontrack designed the solution which was put forth to the
customer and finally approved. The client also needed to monitor the critical
server (including hardware, OS and application or database), monitoring the IT
network, managing the hardware asset as well as software distribution.

This project helped the customer get real time status on the availability and
performance of business-critical servers through best practices monitoring of
key server components is provided. The client could also collect and report on
historical information. Besides this the client could monitor the status of
systems and applications-providing system and application usage visibility
allows businesses to maintain, meet or exceed SLAs. And most importantly, it
could back up numerous file versions to the hierarchy of storage in the event of
online storage device failure, data errors or accidental file deletions for easy
data restoration.

Fastest Growing SP: Visesh Infotecnics

On The Fast Track

Adding a contact center with BPO and KPO facilities at Gurgaon was Visesh
Infotecnics' significant achievement in the last fiscal, and the company is
looking to add more seats to the same, as part of its growth strategy

Visesh Infotecnics has always done business the fun way and that's exactly
why the company is flexing its muscle now as the fastest growing solution
providers of the country. In the first place it never strived hard to become
among the largest SI or IT companies in India or so said its founder Sanjiv
Bhavnani.

He never believed in providing services in the conventional way ie, being
physically present at the client's site when it comes to providing facilities
like managed services. Instead, Visesh has always laid emphasis on having its
own set of innovations and vision and provide the best of the services from
remote locations.

All of these factors put together helped the company register a turnover of
Rs 109 crore in 2007-08 compared to Rs 74.56 the previous fiscal. These factors
also helped the company walk away with the DQ Channels Excellence Award for the
fastest growing SP. Last fiscal, the company launched a couple of products and
added a contact center with BPO and KPO facilities at Gurgaon. The company made
a humble start to it with 200 odd seats in the same. And in the years to come,
it will be adding more seats to the contact center in order to drive growth.

It was the initiatives taken at the bottomline that helped the company grow
its topline. Visesh innovated around newer technologies and created a more
service base for the niche segments. This helped it pick up more in terms of
business and hence has resulted its topline growth as well.

Sanjeev Bhavnani of Visesh Infotecnics receiving the trophy for the 'Fastest Growing Solution Provider' from Sandeep Nair, MD, Emerson Power Networks India

Currently, the company is looking to upgrade its KPO capacities from a level
of 200 seats to about 1,200 seats. In addition to this, it is also looking to
get into the voice space. According to the company, very recently its
topline-bottomline ratio has become healthier and this also means that it is
moving in the right direction. Visesh has manpower strength of 306, of which 237
are technical staff.

The successful and timely completion of projects was yet another reason why
the company grew leaps and bounds. Visesh launched Porn Restraint Technology
platform project. Porn Restraint is a product that incorporates Image Analyser
3.0 technology for parental guidance and thus helps in scanning porn images/.

Another significant achievement was implementing GPS-based Corporate
Personnel Movement Application for JP Morgan Chase Contact Centers at Mumbai and
Bangalore besides deploying TransXS devices over GPRS network. The project pilot
started in the previous year using Visesh's in-house developed TransXS devices
and CPM application on the GSM network for JP Morgan Chase's Contact Center at
Mumbai and was recognized by PC Quest as the Most Innovative Technology
developed in India in 2006.

Fastest Growing SP (runner-up): Valuepoint Systems

Growing Fast And How

With a focus on providing greater value to its solutions while trying to
reach newer geographies, Bangalore-based Valuepoint Systems is an obvious winner
in the category of fastest growing SPs

Bangalore-based Valuepoint Systems bagged the runner-up award for the
'Fastest Growing SP. The company registered a growth of 30 percent and has been
maintaining a three-digit growth rate for the past two fiscals. Last fiscal
Valuepoint Systems added 'value to growth'. Having achieved over Rs 100 crore in
total revenue by doing business in Bangalore alone, the company achieved a big
landmark in terms of its business. With an employee strength of 300, which it
hopes to double in the next fiscal, Valuepoint Systems has been focusing on
geographic expansion and opened offices in the US, Middle East, as well as in
Singapore. Within India, the company has opened offices in Chennai, Cochin,
Hyderabad and Mumbai. With an aim to get a national footprint, the company has
plans to open offices in Pune, Ahmedabad, Chandigarh and Kolkata.

Accepting the award from Sandeep Nair, MD, Emerson Network Power India, the
usually reticent RS Shanbhag, Director, Valuepoint Systems thanked DQ Channels
and said that his attendance to the SP Summit had become mandatory and was part
of his annual calendar.

RS Shanbhag, Director, Valuepoint Systems receiving the runner-up award for the 'Fastest Growing SP' from Sandeep Nair, MD, Emerson Network Power India

According to Shanbhag, there have been various factors that have contributed
to this triple digit CAGR. “We have opened our branch offices in 10 locations
across the country, after 15 years of our existence in this business. Investment
has been made on sales resources, marketing activities and seeding activities in
last two years, and they have paid results now,” said Shanbhag.

He further added, ”We have spread our reach beyond IT/ITeS to other domains
like education, government public sector, life sciences, pharma, construction,
healthcare and manufacturing. By addressing the entire IT requirement of our
existing customers we have been able to offer better solutions. We have also
built a professional networking and communication business team

and have learnt to address even large power backup requirements of our
customers.”

Earlier, Valuepoint Systems was known for their support and volume business.
But, in the last three years, they have started focusing more on to the
solutions and consulting business. This has increased their topline as well as
bottomlines exponentially. Additionally, the company has increased its reach in
Bangalore by opening two offices to improve their turnaround time.

Shanbhag shared that the above measures have helped him in increasing topline
and bottomline ration by three points in the last two years. “We have crossed
the double digit number after 10 years once again. This speaks for itself as to
how our topline and bottomlines are faring,” Shanbhag quipped.

Incidentally, Valuepoint Systems, diversified into software development, BPO
and knowledge outsourcing last year.

Most Comprehensive SP: Frontier Business Solutions

Providing Comprehensive Solutions

Frontier Business Solutions has to its credit an array of technologies
that help the company to provide a very comprehensive range of solutions to its
customers. It is no surprise that the company stood out as the most
comprehensive SP

Bangalore-based Frontier Business Systems-the winner for the 'Most
Comprehensive Solution Provider' at the third DQ Channel SP summit recently
added new offerings like security consulting and certification to its
operations, and started a new services division, while successfully launching
the ITIL training and certification in Bangalore and Chennai. Ravi Verdes,
Director, Frontier Business Systems received the award.

Speaking about the various technologies that they are offering, Verdes said,
“With its experience and expertise garnered over 14-years, in multiple
technologies and domains, Frontier can efficiently design and execute complex IT
infrastructure projects thereby helping organizations acquire, deploy, manage
and secure a wide array of IT infrastructure solutions.”

Frontier is divided into many strategic business units, each of which has its
own sales, pre-sales, services sales and services delivery (support) teams. This
structure has enabled each business unit to specialize in its business area
besides having a dominant presence in the market.

By offering personal computing solutions to enterprise computing solutions,
networking solutions, LAN cabling solutions, networking services, power
solutions and a host of software solutions, Frontier caters to a huge set of
customers across various market verticals. Last year the company ventured into
many news businesses that included information security consulting,
infrastructure management and infrastructure architecture and consulting.

Ravi Verdes of Frontier Business Systems receiving the trophy for 'Most Comprehensive SP' from Shyam Malhotra, Editor-in-Chief, CyberMedia India

Speaking about the new ventures Verdes said, “We expect 25 percent of our
turnover to come from IT services by 2010.”

He further added, “At Frontier we have a core team, which keeps track of the
various industry trends and constantly recommends the strategy to the top
management to venture into possible new technologies and domains.”

According to Verdes, once they have decided to select the technology, then
the real work begins. “In order to select the right vendor, business or
organization, one has to be very careful and a detailed analysis should be done.
There are a lot of vendors in the market who work with technologies. The most
difficult part is figuring out who is best suited to work with particular
organization,” he added.

The core team at Frontier reviews the proposals, checks references and also
determines what is its client contingency plan if it goes out of business or is
acquired? Then Frontier participates in product demonstrations in the case of
software or reviews work samples in the case of database developers. Based on
the set guidelines, a rating system is used to evaluate the final proposal.

Most Comprehensive SP (Runner-up): Ashtech Infotech

A Finger In Every Pie

Though Ashtech Infotech offers more or less every enterprise solution, but
during the last fiscal, it focused most on virtualization and consolidation. The
reason being the increasing adoption of greener IT policies by clients and a
space crunch amongst datacenters

Ashtech Infotech has truly risen like a phoenix from the ashes to entrench
itself firmly on the national solution providing map. Starting out as a
peripherals trading company, over the years, it has made a smooth transition to
a pure-play solution provider. It has added every leading IT brand in its
portfolio and has managed to offer vast spectrum of solutions, be it computing,
which includes mobile computing, storage, security, backup/recovery, enterprise
systems management, and services, which include infrastructure management,
technology consulting, etc. It has vendor alliances with Acer, Apple, Citrix,
Cisco Systems, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, RSA Security, Sun
Microsystems, Veritas and VMWare.

Some of its clients include ABN AMRO Bank, Alliance Capital, Bloomberg,
Citibank, Crisil, HDFC Bank, Accenture, Morgan Stanley, Ness Technologies, Trac
Mail, Alkem Labs, Blue Star, Cadila, Reliance, Videocon, BARC, Dalal
Consultants, Global Esecure, Vodafone, ISRO and Tata Infotech.

Saurin Shah of Ashtech Infotech receiving the runner-up trophy for the 'Most Comprehensive SP' from Shyam Malhotra, Editor-in-Chief, CyberMedia India

This is precisely why the company wowed the jury and walked away with the DQ
Channels Excellence trophy for the 'Most Comprehensive Solution Provider'. And
when Saurin Shah, Founder, Ashtech Infotech walked up to receive his award, he
quipped that he too was not aware that he had so many alliances!

Currently, Ashtech is largely concentrating on offering enterprise technology
solutions like enterprise computing, storage, mail messaging, consolidation,
virtualization, business continuity, consulting and backup and recovery. Most of
these solutions were the highest contributing technology areas for Ashtech's
overall revenues.

Last fiscal, the company got into two new solution arenas. These were
consolidation and virtualization. The reason it entered both these business
areas is because a lot of its clients had space constraints, especially the ones
in cities like Mumbai. Additionally, with the growing awareness of green IT or
computing products and processes, which save energy and protect the environment,
customers were seeking alternatives like virtualization. Clients were also
demanding that multiple OS be loaded on the same server. While adding new
technologies, Ashtech works on two basic principles. It first evaluates its
customer's needs to see which solutions would best address it and whether it can
scale up to offer the same. The second depends on the vendor engagements. Often
when a partnering vendor launches new products, Ashtech's technical team works
very closely to see how best these products can be positioned for its existing
customer matrix.

Last fiscal, Ashtech hired 30 new personnel and trained around the same
number. As for the market segment divide, Ashtech Infotech's major revenue share
came from the banking and financial services industries. SME/SMB contributed 30
percent to Ashtech's total revenue, while IT/ITeS/telecom contributed 20
percent. To round it up, government projects contributed five percent to the
total Ashtech revenue.

JURY'S AWARD: Locuz Enterprise Solutions

Predicting Tsunami

Locuz Enterprise Solutions' tsunami prediction project deployment for
their client INCOIS, helped it bag the special Jury's Award. It was coincidental
that the award was given to Locuz at Andaman, which was badly affected by the
tsunami recently

During the jury meeting for deciding the winners of the Channels Excellence
Awards, all the panel members kept coming up with the name of one particular
solution provider for almost all the categories, but could not give it any
particular award. That is why it was finally given a special Jury's Award for
its Indian National Center for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS), tsunami
prediction project deployment.

Talking about this project, Durganadh Venkata, VP-Business Development, Locuz
Enterprise Solutions said, “Locuz and its competitors were given chances to
discuss an appropriate technology solution that would meet data storage and
management needs of INCOIS as part of the pre tendering process. We along with
Sun Microsystems produced the joint value proposition after elaborate
understanding of the current and future needs of the project.”

Durganadh Venkata of Locuz Enterprise Solutions receiving the special 'Jury's Award' trophy from Princy Bhatnagar, Director-New Office Group, Xerox India

The design efforts required a comprehensive understanding from Locuz on the
ocean modeling and those details, which lead to producing vital data on Tsunami
Early Warning System.

The designing of the project involved a three-tier storage architecture with
a need for multiple servers to read and write to the same instance of data
without compromising data integrity. Locuz's design included Sun QFS to meet
this need and the data movement for tiering and protection was performed using
SAM-FS.

The project did face few challenges right from the beginning as the solution
being offered was among most technical storage deployments at the time. “It
included multi-OS systems being able to access same data not just simultaneously
but over high performance. The data lifecycle management was the other critical
requirement of the project and hence it required us to evaluate other global
deployments that were of similar nature,” Venkata informed.

“The solution offered in the project is assisting the customer in effectively
managing large volumes of real time data while delivering the efficient sharing
of data amongst multiple independent servers in a heterogeneous SAN environment.
Adding to that the capability for multiple servers to both read and write
simultaneously to the same files in the same file system, continuous backup of
shared file system using SAM-FS backup features and networked-based backup of
servers using Enterprise Backup Suite, Policy-based data archive and HSM using
SAM-FS are providing a huge support to our customers to have a seamless data
collection,” Venkata explained.

According to Vijay Wadhi, President, Locuz Enterprise Solutions the focus on
enterprise infrastructure space, industry domain and value through deep
understanding and methodologies in deploying technology have made Locuz into a
successful company.