"We are looking to expand in the telecom space"

Iris Computers is setting a target of emerging as one of the top 3 national distributors and is eyeing Rs 6,000 crore turnover in 6 to 8 quaters. Iris is on the spree, bagging multi-crore projects in government and large enterprise space after being financially supported by Inflexionpoint founded by John Sculley. To know more about this, Dataquest spoke to Sanjiv Krishen, Chairman, Iris Computers. Excerpts

Why this acquisition?

We started Iris in September 96' and our first years' turnover was Rs 5 crore. This March we crossed Rs 2,000 crore mark. The growth has been fairly decent. We had huge amount of orders in hand. In order to grow further, one needs more and more credit limits and funding and foreign investors are useful from that angle. The foreign investors said they will get us the bank limits and they have done that. So the constraint which we had of not being able to fund the orders we were getting has been removed. That was a very big constraint. So this is how this acquisition came into. That's why the need for this acquisition.

How has the performance been since the take over?
Very good. Last year we grew more than 20% and last four months of this year, ie, April, May, June and July we have recorded the growth as per our expectation.

Which verticals are seeing good traction?
There are many other verticals where you will see growth in India. For eg, with the new government come in power, they are much willing to invest in infrastructure, education, employment generation.

What is the existing product portfolio?
We have crossed the Rs 2,000 crore mark, and now this year the target is Rs 3,000 crore. We buy from IBM, HP, Lenovo, all the good names and major guys and we sell through resellers and we have 3,200 resellers. These resellers sell to end customers. We have 288 employers. We have 35 locations all over the country where we have our own offices. Our own people.

Do you see rise in number of partners?
We are expecting to double the number of partners.

Apart from distribution business are you looking for other opportunities in any other business?

For Iris it will be distribution. We are looking to expand in the telecom space.