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Hot seat
Dreams come first
K Padmanabhan, managing director of Teledata Informatics,
knows how to realise his dreams, no matter how long he has to wait to make them
come true, writes Sudipta Dev
 When you meet
the man, his soft-spoken, affable personality does not strike you as someone
who has chased a dream with single-minded determination for almost one-and-half
decade, accumulating the resources to make it possible. K Padmanabhan always
wanted to become an entrepreneur. So after his MS from IIT Chennai, he joined
the merchant navy where he worked for 14 years, always sure that one day he
would start his own business. “Right from the beginning I wanted to be
a businessman. I joined the sea to make enough money to do business,” he
says matter-of-factly. By the time he left the navy he had risen to the position
of chief engineer.
During his years on the high seas, he realised that there was no software exclusively
for the shipping industry. And this he saw as a business opportunity with great
potential. In 1989 he left the navy. Even before this he had been working on
the side to start his business venture. He set up Teledata in 1990 using the
domain expertise of his background, and engaged software professionals to do
the programming work. Today In India all Indian shipping companies use Teledata’s
products. “Initially in 2001, when we were trying to sell our product,
the ShipManager, to US-based companies, we found the going very difficult. They
were not ready to accept an Indian product. We then employed an agent. He was
an Englishman who went to the same companies and they bought it,” recalls
Padmanabhan. He says that the problem is mostly limited to getting the first
customer, after which the software speaks for itself. Currently, Teledata is
one of the leading ERP companies for marine applications. It is now a Rs 300
crore organisation, and its suite of products (marine and school management)
are sold in 10 countries.
The company has recently made four acquisitions—one each in the US and
UAE, and two in Singapore. For Padmanabhan, one of his biggest achievements
has been the kind of support the company has been able to generate from the
Thai and Singapore governments. He says the Singapore government had wanted
to create a marine corridor, something like a one-stop shop. “We were the
only one in Asia with the software. A joint venture was consequently formed.
Marine Systems is the marketing division of Teledata. Local units make a whole
difference to marketing,” he states.
The company’s joint venture with the Thai government has been in the education
sector. All education products are sold under the name of Teledata Systems and
Services. Its WebEIM (Education Institution Manager) is also being used by many
schools in the US and Malaysia. The company started selling it in India in 2004.
Being a costly product, the target is big universities and state governments.
Its rising popularity can be judged from the fact that while in 2003, 75 percent
of the company’s revenues came from the ship management product and 20
percent from the school management system, currently both are fetching equal
revenue. For a professional who has been in the shipping industry all his life,
it does not come as a surprise when Padmanabhan acknowledges that developing
the ShipManager has given him a lot of satisfaction, although the opportunities
in the education sector are much more.
Teledata currently has 220 employees in the country, of which 46 are programmers
and the others support staff, documentation staff, etc. “We are the only
company to give 24x7 phone support to our clients, both Indian and international.
We learn from every client, and continuously improve our product,” he says.
For instance, the company is currently trying to meet the requirements of schools
in Malaysia and Thailand, which want the system to automatically send an SMS
to parents if the child fails to turn up for classes.
A man who has little time to pursue any other interest besides
his work, Padmanabhan is still chasing a dream—this time to make his organisation
the number one software product company in India.
sudipta@expresscomputeronline.com
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