Indian offshorer lands in Australia

Indian IT solutions provider Allied Digital Services will hang out its Australian shingle next week, its first full-time country manager arriving in Sydney to sign partners as the first step to build its channel.

Former LANDesk executive Ali Khan told CRN he will kick start Allied's operations here, scouting premises in either Sydney or Melbourne and staff for the new entity, Allied Digital Australia Pty Ltd.

The Australian operation will white label its offerings to be resold under the brands of its managed service provider partners, Khan said. It will monitor services such as those provided by Oracle to ensure that customers were using what they paid for and automate help desk functions so smaller managed services provider can scale up quickly, he said.

"We'll have technical and sales people on the ground," Khan said.

"We're saying we need to partner with Australian [resellers] but on the back end we can do things to improve your offering.

"The [Allied Digital] local staff will be channel managers rather than sales managers."

The business based in Mumbai had audited annual net sales to the end of March last year of INR55,210 lacs (A$134 million); its first half unaudited net income was INR35,524 lacs compared to INR25,443 lacs for the same period the year before.

Khan said Allied Digital Services had 4000 workers in Britain, India and in its US subsidiary En Pointe Global Services. It was expanding offshore to "ensure reduction of dependence on [the] Indian economy", its prospectus said.

Khan said the local operation (through its parent company) had alliances with Lenovo, LANDesk and Avocent. Its website also listed Microsoft, Unisys, Intel and IBM as vendor partners.

He said Allied Digital will soon launch an "in-control offering" or micro-site for Lenovo called "Think-Control" to manage compliance, usage, help desk and other functions.

Allied Digital would also offer leasing and finance terms to its partners so they "would not have to buy it up front".

"We'd rather they sell it perpetually," Khan said.

Channel to the fore

Allied Digital's website said it specialised in IT infrastructure and services management, technical support and outsourcing for companies such as McDonald's, Esso and Sony. Its 2007 prospectus said it focused on vertical-enterprise solutions including consultancy for manufacturers, retailers and telcos using its enterprise software suite built on open-source technologies such as Linux, Apache and web browser standards.

It serviced its customers from a global service delivery centre and network operations centre in India. Khan said it may open a data centre in the region, most likely in New Zealand for cost reasons.

Its prospectus said Allied Digital had "ambitious plans to either take over local companies or strike an alliance with these companies to strengthen our presence within that local domain" and had bought a $50 million-a-year solutions provider in the US and was on the cusp of sealing similar deals in Britain and Asia.

But Khan said the Indian business would follow analyst advice that a channel was the best strategy in Australia and New Zealand.

The business was an early adopter of the IT infrastructure library or ITIL and managed services for help desks, networks, document storage, asset and inventory, servers and applications, relationships, resources and finance, company documents said.

And it specialised in remote management from 132 support centres for more than 450 cities across India.

Khan was Australia and New Zealand business development manager for LANDesk before going back to California two years ago.

Company documents showed that it had a representative working from a home-office in the outer-west Sydney suburb of Quakers Hill but that was just to "handle their global clients who had offices in Australia", Khan said.