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| This David has grown up |
| Written by Karamjit Singh | |||
| Thursday, 02 April 2009 14:32 | |||
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Yet Praba says listing is not a top priority; it is just an enabler for the company to achieve the growth it seeks. “We are not confused by the two.” Typically, a recession makes companies more careful about how they spend their money and take a hard look at the ROI of any technology investment made. Good companies also use a downturn to reduce operational costs and crank up efficiency. For many, the smart and strategic adoption of information technology is the way to achieve these goals. This suits Praba fine because since he left IBM in 1992, he has carved a multimillion-ringgit business out of helping companies spend smartly. He initially tied up with some Singaporeans in a company called Computer Merchants, which bought and sold second-hand PCs and was involved in disaster recovery, a nascent business at the time. Then Praba decided to strike out on his own and established Basis Bay in 1997. The timing was fortuitous as that was the year Bank Negara Malaysia pushed for the financial sector to implement disaster recovery (DR) services. “So, even though it was a very new service, the regulatory push by Bank Negara, which was quite fast and responsive to see the importance of this to the financial industry, really made it happen.” By then, Bank Negara also had its own DR site and really walked the talk, Praba notes. Besides the DR services offered, there was the buying and selling of second-hand PCs and other hardware such as servers back then. As companies could easily save between 30% to 50% by using second-hand hardware, the core value proposition here was cost. It was then that Praba learnt a key lesson about the importance of branding and confidence. Today, he faces the same challenge of creating brand awareness and winning confidence for his own company. “We were selling hardware that the big boys were selling too; only theirs was new equipment. But customers needed to have confidence that we had the ability to service them and that the products we were selling were legal (selling second-hand computing equipment was very new back then and some customers were worried a third party was not authorised to service the equipment).” They did not question the quality of the actual hardware which carried the various multinational brands. Today, while Basis Bay has created its own branded servers called Jazz, something Praba is proud of, the bigger challenge is building Basis Bay into a brand, and getting it accepted and seen as trustworthy, not least because it will allow the company to enjoy higher margins down the road in its four main lines of business — hardware provision (both pre-owned and new through offline and online sales channels), data centre development, systems integration and services provision. But right now, it is a rocky road to travel. This is a familiar refrain for regular readers of netv@lue2.0 but it does not make the issue any less urgent to deal with. Praba puts it aptly when he says, “Something produced locally or a service delivered by Malaysians is still considered inferior.” It is time to get real, he argues. If Malaysia wants to be an IT nation, it needs to start believing in its own products. Even at government level, he feels there has not been enough effort put into this. It has been in bits and pieces but a constructive effort has to be put in place. “The buy-local idea needs to be sold like it is going out of style,” Praba says emphatically. As things stand, Basis Bay has to work doubly hard to ensure it does not fail a customer and Praba feels even the recognition the company gets is not in proportion to the work put in. This is not to say he is bitter. Rather, he finds the situation “extremely frustrating” as Basis Bay has been competing with the big boys of the tech industry ever since it began in 1997 and has been winning. It is actually not that difficult, he feels, as he has seen it done in different parts of the world too. In the early days, Basis Bay used to say this competition between the company and the multinational corporations (MNCs) was a David versus Goliath battle, but today it feels it is on a par with the MNCs in many aspects of the services and products it delivers. The challenge is to get wider market recognition. This is important because in many cases, when chief information officers make decisions to invest in technology, often times they take the safe route and buy a top-tier branded product. In the management world, they say “Nobody got sacked for hiring McKinsey & Co management consultants”. A similar saying exists in the tech world, but Praba and his high-powered team of executives are determined to break that. Basis Bay is doing some interesting things which should see it enjoy greater respect in the Malaysian market. The unveiling of its Tier IV data centre in Cyberjaya will be a key part of that. Next week: While MDeC has been great, Praba suggests what the government can do to put companies like his on equal footing with MNCs This article appeared in Netvalue2.0, the technology section of The Edge Malaysia, Issue 746, March 16-22, 2009.
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