By P. Hari and Shishir Prasad ,

BUSINESSWORLD
December 1, 2003

SUDHIR Sharma packed his bags for a US trip this April. That was only his second business trip to that country. Sharma had set up Network Solutions (Netsol) in 1993 and seen it grow to Rs 120 crore in 10 years. He wanted it to grow faster, like the Wipros and the Satyams, but he was not willing to turn to software services just for the sake of growth for his company. He knew the area he wanted to be in and was biding time, waiting for the right growth opportunity there.

Netsol's Sharma has found the way to grow: through smaller brick-and-mortar operations

On this trip, he went to meet the smaller brick-and-mortar firms in the US. Netsol is a systems integrator, one of the best and largest in India. It knew networks inside out. For a-year-and-a-half, Sharma had been using this knowledge to develop software for monitoring networks. Network management was big business, with mega corporations like IBM and Hewlett-Packard offering mega software at mega prices. But those prices made it unaffordable for most companies. So, thought Sharma, if he could sell network management software at a not-so-mega price, he could have the market served to him on a platter.

He visited the US in April, then in June, again in August and once more in October. By now he has started pilot studies on his products with two US companies. He hopes to bag two orders by the end of November and five by January. The customers are all of medium size, between $1 billion and $3 billion in revenues. Each order could be worth $40,000 for Netsol. Each sale could bring in several times more in services over several years. It is Netsol's first crack at the US market.

The products manage different parts of an IT network. You could see from Bangalore, for example, whether your switches at the Houston office are functioning properly. You could monitor a global network from one location, and solve many problems from there too. Large network management software products like Tivoli or Unicenter TNG can manage tens of thousands of nodes from a single point. But Sharma believes he has a superior product for the small enterprise.

Sharma's plan is like this. Use the products to enter the US market. Services around the product will bring in more revenue soon. Later, he can bag contracts to manage entire networks from his Bangalore Network Operating Centre (NOC). One day Netsol will try to own and manage the entire IT infrastructure of corporations. The business promises him big bucks, the globe as the stage and the most powerful IT companies in the world as competition.