Press Releases - 2005

A decade – old company offers enterprise solutions across verticals
Business India, Bangalore, August 15, 2005

Narayan Rajan became an entrepreneur very early in life: while still at college, he used to run Internet seminars to tell the business community why they should get Net-friendly. “Actually, I got my seed capital from the sponsorship I raised for these seminars,” says Narayan, now chief executive officer of the Bangalore-based i-Vista Digital Solutions Ltd. that  he set up at age 21 with a friend as soon as he finished his B.Sc in electronics in 1996.

“Philips was my first major customer.” Narayan recalls.  “Those were the days before laptops, I carried my PC to make a presentation on a CD-ROM marketing tool to a general manager who had come in from the Netherlands.  He asked me how much it cost, but I had no idea! So I threw a figure of Rs.1.5 lakh at him off the top of my head and got the order, because it would have cost them ten times that much to get it done back home.”

By 1997, i-Vista refined its business offering to what Narayan calls a ‘connected enterprise solution’ to meet companies’ needs for everything to do with Web – based transactions, both internal and external.  “We grew extremely rapidly till 2001, and set up a subsidiary company in the US to concentrate on medical software,” he says.  “ We won a $500,000 engagement that Arthur Anderson was fighting us tooth and nail to win.”

The assignment Narayan likes to talk most about is the ‘Who’s On Call?’ project esteem executed for the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Centre to consolidate the standardize the presentation of the call coverage schedules of its 45 divisions, cutting the almost 200 hours of administrative time.  “At go live, 100 per cent of the divisions were using ‘Who’s on Call?’ for all schedule and change publishing for 170 services and 900 personal,” he says.  “All nursing units and ancillary nursing services also had access to the system, to find call coverage information within 90 seconds.”  This system was developed for $50,000 against a budget of $80,000 and can save $95,000 in yearly cost, besides providing improved efficiency and communication he says.

But then came the burst: 2001 was also the first year the company made a loss: “We couldn’t cope with the cost of running and managing both teams,” he explains.  Of course, that was also the time of the dot-com bust and the general recession. The following year , Narayan and his team concentrated on rebuilding i-Vista.  “ We had worked with companies like Motorola, IBM, GE and i-flex, so it was not so difficult to come back,”  he says. 

The restructuring involved cutting down form 50 people to 10, eliminating the entire middle management team.  He also bought out his partner because “we disagreed on the restructuring idea.”  Through the bad phase, when the team had time on their hands, i-Vista built products, including iMorfus, and intranet suite, and i-seek, a proprietary search engine optimization methodology.  The concentration was on making them “so cheap that no one could refuse.”  It also introduced a “pay as you use’ use model, charging as little as Rs.150 per person per month. “ That’s less then they would spend for lunch!”  Narayan points out.

i-Vista is currently working with Air Deccan to set up its intranet system.  A spokesperson for the airline, however declines to comment on the company “till the project is successfully completed.”  Peter Yorke, associate vice president in charge of corporate marketing at i-flex solutions, is more forthcoming: “We rely on them for all our internal and external Web work,” he says.  They’ve also developed a Web and CD-based training module for our FLEXCUBE product, to ship to our customers.”

Jessica Munday, president of Trio solutions, also says that having the team available to Trio’s clients is “a true benefit to our portfolio of services”. Trio is also a distributor for i-Vista’s products, for which they have sold about 1 thousand licenses, besides being a user itself there are obviously more clients like i-flex and trio: “about 95 percent of my business is from referrals,” says Narayan. With 22 people and modest revenue of Rs.2.5 Crore today, he is looking at flying high with the likes of the new budget airlines in India, while the US operation continues to provide Web-based transaction solutions for hospitals, doctors’ groups and others in the ‘e-health’ segment.

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