“Data center is our core competency” – Santosh Agrawal, Esconet Technologies

Santosh Agrawal, Esconet Technologies has evolved over the years while striking the right chord at the right time. Updated himself and the company with the new technologies and adopted them at a time when the companies were hesitant to do, Esconet is riding high on the technologies on offer. In an exclusive chat with Santosh Agrawal, itVARnews finds out the strategies Esconet adopted to become a leader among the peers.

Santosh Agrawal, Director, Esconet Technologies started his company in 1998 and the focus was only on product distribution but he found that it was not suiting their business model so they slowly migrated to solution based company. The initial capital invested by Aggarwal was INR25 lakhs and he did not know much about technology in earlier days. They started with PCs, laptops, filters and peripherals first and later on slowly learn the technology and started moving towards Data Center. The company is now an IT infrastructure company today and is not into end point devices like PCs, laptops, and printers.

They also do IT infrastructure and are targeting on storage, network and security. Initially the company was purely into distribution, when Agrawal took over the company he started hiring HP as a product line that to PCs and peripherals and then they also joined hands with Intel and started doing DPLC which is enterprise platform which comprise of mostly server components and work station components and this business they are still doing and are one of the leaders in North for Intel.

Esconet also joined hands with D-link in 2002 and started doing network business. The company slowly migrated to Cisco since D-link has had a changeover in management and the company did not match with their business model so they left D-link and started working with Cisco. Till date the company is dealing with Cisco, EMC, VmWare, HP, and Intel. Excerpts from interview

What is the present focus of the Esconet Technologies?

The present Focus is purely on IT infrastructure and we have our own small little cloud office where we offer platform as a service to the consumer. So cloud computing is our focus apart from that we are capable of building private clouds, and helping out customers to migrate to other clouds.

What are the other solutions you are offering?

The focus is mostly towards virtualization these days and the VMware is our partners from four years now and based on that partnership we do server, desktop virtualization, business continuity and ERP solutions.

Which verticals are more potential for your business?

We are observing growth mostly in the commercial segment, smaller medium business, that’s where the maximum growth is coming from. Although we do not have a significant presence in large enterprises but we have not been able to see much growth in the segment. The business is almost stagnant. We are targeting mostly manufacturing, consulting, and education sector has contributed to our growth. We are getting 50% business from manufacturing.

Do you find any challenge in tapping the verticals?

Every customer today is a challenge, and in SMB business we also see that the customers from the same verticals are having different kind of requirements and we just can’t copy paste the same solution for the customers. We believe in tailoring the solutions according to customers rather than doing a copy paste.

How do you tap the verticals?

People do talk about the marketing engine but we really have seen that nothing has worked for us towards marketing. We get business mostly through referrals, otherwise there are certain OEMs also who pass on leads to us and we follow those leads and generate business.

How do you see the market for your solutions?

We see a good potential now. Last year has been pretty dull for us but this year we saw upfront market and this quarter has already given good business to us.

What was the turnover of 2013-14 financial Year?

We close to around INR 25 crores and expect to close next financial year to around INR 35 crores.

What are your expansion plans?

We will be opening new locations by next year. We are catering to almost every part of the world and have customers abroad also but all of them have been catered from our head office only.

What are your core competencies?

Data center is the core competency. Everything within the Data center is our core competencies.

Which vendor you do most of your business?

In terms of value Intel is one vendor which has given us the highest revenue till date. But apart from that most of our business is also from Cisco, EMC and VMware.