12 - Sure And Steady...

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color="#FFFFFF" SIZE="2">MD: GANESH NATARAJAN

This year Mumbai-based Aptech Ltd

must take some fairly important decisions for the future. One, what will be the future

character of its instruction-led training paradigm-one that it has used for the last 13

years of its existence? Two, what will be the full magnitude of its globalization

plans-where will it culminate in the future? And three, will it or will it not be

perceived as a function of the will and vision of a single man-its charismatic CEO Ganesh

Natarjan.

In the last 13 years, Aptech has been on a

roll. Thousands of youngsters, with dreams of making their careers in the area of IT, have

helped push Aptech into a growth orbit. From scratch, the company toted up revenues of Rs

304 crore last fiscal and became the first Indian IT training company to cross the

thousand mark in centers in 10 countries worldwide. Besides the career computer courses,

Aptech entered into a tie-up with Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) to offer

the latter's Bachelor of Computer Applications degree program through its premier centers

in India and abroad. With this Aptech now has relationships with four universities in the

world, the other three being with the Open University of Canada, British Columbia, Pace

University of New York, and the University of Northumbria, UK. Last year, Aptech also

entered the US training market by opening a center at Princeton, New Jersey, and the

African market with a center at Mombasa, Kenya.

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align="right">Two other divisions of Aptech, Asset and Arena, also expanded their

businesses in the areas of professional and multimedia training respectively, while the

consulting division made significant progress contributing close to 10 percent of Aptech's

overall revenue. The newly-created enterprise solutions division entered the ERP arena

through a tie-up with Baan, while the software products division continued with the RDBMS

products from Oracle, Informix, and Sybase and other client server products like

PowerBuilder, SCO Unix, and NetWare. This division contributed Rs 24 crore to the turnover

in the first year of operations itself, and is expected to be a high-growth area in the

coming year. But overall, much of the focus last year was on the consulting division,

which was strengthened considerably.

The high point for the company came when

its multimedia projects division delivered the AGM of Reliance Industries over the

Internet live-a first for any public company in India. This was followed by live Internet

coverage of Femina Miss India Contest, the Filmfare Awards and the ZEE Cine Awards.

In education the focus last year was on

retraining and on continuity of its differentiation initiative. Launched over two years

ago the differentiation technique looks at specialization within the IT training industry,

which could be growth areas for its students. In the last year the specific areas of

differentiation which Aptech focused on were networking, the Internet, and multimedia.

Retraining or certification programs

formed much of the company's expansion plans over the year. Aptech, too, got onto the

Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP) bandwagon. This, alongwith other certification

programs like the Novell Certified Engineer and ERP training, form the backbone of the

retraining program which has emerged as a core focus areas for the training industry. For

Aptech this is where the high growth is going to come from in the coming years.

The company is also becoming increasingly

aggressive and ambitious on the export front. Previously limited to the Southeast region,

the company plans to open more centers in the US and other parts of the world, especially

the developed world, following the success of its New Jersey center. Aptech intends to

have at least 40 more centers across different parts of the globe by the end of the year.

Interestingly, Aptech is still not taking the Internet route while tapping the

international market. The company sees the Internet as an inherent part of its training

program but believes that 'only Internet'-based training will not be that successful.

Last year Aptech also created the

multimodal educational delivery architecture, which makes use of the multiple formats of

Internet, CBT, video, CD ROM etc. for delivering education. This year, it is likely that

Aptech will invest considerably in the creation of the multimodal infrastructure so that

delivery methodologies become more streamlined. As the first cut objective, Aptech is in

the process of creating a virtual classroom by using technologies to facilitate delivery,

interaction, and evaluation of the course content.

One problem the company must resolve this

year is that of succession planning. Unlike many other companies in the Top 20 club,

Aptech is very closely associated with its CEO Natarajan. While src="aptech3.jpg" width="300" height="119" alt="aptech3.jpg (17659 bytes)" border="0"

hspace="4" vspace="2" align="right">this has

enabled the company to set up a scorching growth pace, this might also become a key

limitation in regard to future growth. Even some of the financial analysts that DQ spoke

to in the course of the Top 20 survey indicated a similar apprehension. With the company's

global expansion, it might become imperative for Aptech to at least initiate a plan that

will incorporate this crucial aspect of leadership. The flip side to this, of course, is

that announcement of a successor might lower the morale of the second-tier team that

exists today. The real question is how long can Aptech afford to ignore this critical

issue.