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Chabria Infotech

rated software industry was thriving as much then as it is now. Though the contours of the piracy industry were not well defined, but most people never understood the impact it made. “This was just the early phase of IT in India and there was no concept of buying legal software. So my objective was to utilize this opportunity,” adds Chabria.

The mission is to exceed the expectation of clients says Hemant Chabria, CEO, Chabria Infotech

V

alue of a survey can

never be under-estimated. It does involve innumerable assortment of questions and possibilities, but the derivatives can land one an opportunity of a lifetime. In 1992, when Hemant Chabria, Founder and CEO, Chabria Infotech, decided to go back home to Kolkata (then Calcutta) as a fresh engineering graduate from 36

FT_Hair.indd 36

Bangalore, he decided to move thorough the path of entrepreneurship. “I did a small survey to understand the market at that point in time. I realised that most of the companies functioned under the hardware sector and very few had a software role to play. There were very few corporates at that time. There were no dedicated software players, so I decided to get into this sector,” says Chabria. The pi-

ph o t o g r a p h by foto c o r p

The Birth Pangs Inexperience often creates jitters, let alone when setting up a new venture. The challenges faced by new companies to setup and flourish are countless. This was also the time when India had opened up its economy and the odds were in favour of entrepreneurial individuals. “As expected, starting any business is tough. There were challenges. We were not sure of the direction we had to take. We were unsure about the sustainability of providing only software. There was a lack of clarity then, and getting legal software was not easy. But as we gained orders, the experience too kicked in. But surely the initial days were tough. Slowly companies like Microsoft and Autodesk were looking for authorised partners for their products. That was the time when we decided to partner with these companies,” recollects Chabria. But for certain reasons Lotus was not keen to authorise partners in the eastern region and that seemed to be a challenge for Chabria Infotech as Lotus was the highest selling product compared to Microsoft Office those days. The process of getting orders soon began in 1994 for Chabria Infotech. It was time to march forward for the company. “We were selling games and shareware till then and that’s when we got an order from East India Pharmaceuticals for WordStar and I went to deliver the product to the company. Then we had a tender from CMDA and that’s how the whole cycle began,” recalls Chabria. Chabria Infotech presently has close to 7000 customers. In nearly two decades there have been various challenging implementations undertaken by the company. They have done software licensing for various educational institutions. Chabria In-

Indian Channelworld february 2011

2/15/2011 10:57:02 AM


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