Spotlight

Managing business continuity

With over two decades of experience in the IT services space, Omnitech is well positioned to take advantage of upcoming trends in business continuity services, writes Nivedan Prakash

Omnitech InfoSolutions is one of the leading IT services companies in the business availability and business continuity space. The company provides IT services like remote infrastructure management, business continuity planning, disaster recovery, application management, performance management and software testing.

“The motivation behind establishing of Omnitech has been to build an institution which would provide a global platform for young talented people to work as a team, and offer IT technology services to global organizations,” said Atul Hemani, Managing Director, Omnitech InfoSolutions.

The foundation

Founded by Atul Hemani and Avinash Pitale, Omnitech was established in 1990. With global footprints across the US, Bahrain, Japan and pan-India presence, the company first came into limelight in 1993 when it introduced a unique product, the 21 MB 1.44-inch floppy drive, the modular notebook and unique magneto–optical drives.

“There were certain challenges that were faced as it was more concepts selling and the industry had not heard of these technologies before and we had put in efforts to create awareness on such innovations,” commented Hemani.

With an employee strength of about 726, Omnitech achieved a turnover of Rs 77.63 crores for the financial year 2006-2007. For the nine months ending December 31, 2007, it achieved a turnover of Rs 90.26 crores. It has been growing at a CAGR of 41.26% year-on-year from 2000-2006. For the quarter ended December 31, 2007, the growth rate has phenomenally moved up to 86.9% year-on-year.

The company covers different industry segments like the BFSI (Banking, Financial Services and Insurance), manufacturing, utilities, services, government bodies, amongst others. It has multi-year retainership contracts with most of its clients. Omnitech’s major clients include Birla Sunlife Insurance, Crisil, Citibank, Kotak Group, NCR, Bayer, Fullerton, India Infoline, and others.

Working areas

Under the aegis of Business Availability services, Omnitech provides IMS, including RIMS (Remote Infrastructure Management Services), technical helpdesk, IT service management, data center management, service desk, and on-site technology services. With the help of an appliance called OmniMonitor and some industry standard tools, the company offers remote infrastructure monitoring and management services.

The company also provides performance management services. Through its dedicated third party testing services it provides performance testing, load testing, functional testing, and regression testing. These services are provided as SaaS or in BOT model.

Then there are application management services, wherein application development and application maintenance services are offered to clients on various domains and multiple platforms, mainly in the area of business process management.

Under the ambit of turnkey solution services, the company offers end-to-end turnkey solutions in the area of data center building and management, branch automation, virtualization, server/storage consolidation, and customized software development. Lastly, Omnitech has business continuity services, wherein it has done disaster recovery and business continuity planning.

“Through India’s first managed third party disaster recovery center—the OmniCenter—the company is providing workplace recovery services to its clients. The center also has value added services as data vault, DR consulting which spans all areas such as risk assessment, business impact analysis, recovery strategies and plans,” added Hemani.

Over last two decades, Omnitech has also successfully executed hundreds of projects from various domains, catering to various industries of different sizes and complexity. The company has been involved in IMS contracts for financial services, insurance and manufacturing organizations; operational support on ERP environment for a large chemical company; test automation contract for a MNC in the area of banking automation; a large UK-based BPO, workplace recovery and BCP services; and performance testing for life and general insurance companies.

Hemani said, “Although all our projects and products are significant to us, but important breakthrough in the area of remote monitoring services using OmniMonitor, and disaster recovery services through OmniCenter, are currently most significant for us.”

Employee-centric company

Omnitech is an ISO certified organization, hence its HR process also adhere to the same. The suitability of the candidate is matched with the experience level, number of projects handled, the domains worked on and the industry exposure. The company also believes in grooming fresh talent and in this endeavor recruits management trainees from campuses for various functions.

Hemani added, “Our core strength to provide consistent value-add to customers is mainly attributed to our people. Omnitech’s personnel management policy revolves around facilitating every individual associated with Omnitech to achieve his professional and personal goals.”

At Omnitech, it has been a continuous exercise of maintaining high performance density. The company has achieved higher efficiency by providing continuous knowledge and skill upgrade, counseling and coaching to get best out of personal characteristics, motivating through recognitions and awards on periodic basis, and creating a competitive environment across the organization.

“At Omnitech, we have been successful in maintaining more than 90% retention ratio, as against industry standard of around 75 to 80%. We have achieved better retention ratio through the conscious exercise of providing challenging work content, establishing conducive work environment, promoting freedom to innovate and experiment, facilitating hard work with efficient processes and tools, respecting professional and personal priorities, and flexi work timings,” explained Hemani.

Organizational vision

The company plans to expand using both organic and inorganic mechanisms. IMS and particularly RIMS market opportunity provide a massive potential to Omnitech to expand organically. With India’s first third party managed disaster recovery center, OmniCenter, already launched, a chain of global recovery centers is in the pipeline.

“We plan to set up nine such centers in India in the coming two years. We expect to grow over 30 to 35% organically,” added Hemani.

Inorganically, the company has already identified potential acquisition targets in the space of IMS and software testing. It plans to make a couple of acquisitions in the financial year 2008-2009—one domestic and one cross border. Going ahead as its appetite increases, the company would be in a position to make a larger acquisition to expand in other markets, including Europe and the US.

nivedan.prakash@expressindia.com