No.6: Adactin, 2016 CRN Fast50

Navneesh Garg came to Australia in 2010 from his native India with a vision of creating a reseller committed to quality. Having established himself as a permanent resident in his adoptive home, he established Adactin in Parramatta, in Sydney’s burgeoning western suburbs, to provide IT testing consultancy and training services.

“I had visited Australia twice and I liked the multicultural environment that made me feel very welcome,” says Garg. “I love this country.”

Garg says that while there’s more choice for suppliers in India than in Australia, his home market is very cost-conscious. What he saw in Australian customers was a thirst for quality. “People here want innovation and the best possible solutions for a problem. That felt great because I come from a technical background and we want the best possible outcome for the customer.”

This fits with Adactin’s mantra, a portmanteau of “adapt” and “innovation”. The company is etching a niche in lucrative testing services, including training the next generation of IT testing professionals using performance monitoring and load testing software from HP and Neotys.

This focus on helping organisations improve their customer service, especially through digital channels such as websites, propelled Adactin’s revenue from $1.6 million in 2015 to $3.7 million last financial year – an annual growth of nearly 140 percent. It’s all the more impressive because Adactin has no chunky-but-low-margin hardware sales to lift revenue; it’s all generated on the backs of the company’s 40-odd consulting staff.

“This is holistic, so it’s not just functionality of the software but also performance, security and compatibility with different devices, operating systems and browser combinations,” says Garg.

Adactin has had success with Neotys’ suite of tools, including NeoLoad and NeoSense, which enable organisations to simulate and monitor user load on their systems. “The idea is to simulate real user behaviour that includes the packets and data, load and external factors,” says Garg. “We want to be as close as possible to how it would be in a real workload scenario.”

Tools such as Splunk help with providing the raw data to extrapolate historical workload scenarios, and elsewhere user A-B testing is essential, Garg says.

“We try to understand the pattern of how users will use the system. We ask the customer to run up a test or beta version of their site with existing customers and see where they click in the application. From there, we study which patterns and scenarios they use combined with how the stakeholders say they want users to use the system.”

Adactin is also engaging emerging vendors and innovative solutions such as QuerySurge for migration testing and has a channel partnership with NEC. Its knowledge in the energy domain has also attracted high-profile customers such as smart meter vendor Landis+Gyr, Garg says.

The company is also building an analytics practice and will put more emphasis on customer relationship management for Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics and Oracle.

Pictured above: Navneesh Garg, chief executive, Adactin

FAST FACTS

Founded  2011
Key executives  Navneesh Garg, Garry Scarborough, Sapna Bhatia
HQ  Parramatta, Sydney NSW
Growth  138.85%
2016 revenue  $3.7m
Top vendors  HPE, IBM, Neotys