, 40, has set himself a new target "� to complete a marathon (42 km) in three hours, two years from now. Kalpathi has reasons to run. He is a fitness freak. "I run to test my limits," he says.
He has one more goal "� to convert his entire family into health buffs. Why does this look impossible? He lives in a joint family with around a dozen members.
Kalpathi has a bachelor's degree in electronics and computer engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and a master's from Clemson University, South Carolina.
He started his career at Siemens India and was promised work on chip design at a chip fabricating shop the German multinational was putting up in Germany. Within a month, Kalpathi thought that the project wouldn't work out. He switched to HCL and landed in the US to work in Sybase between 1987 and 1990.
He decided to settle in India after his marriage in 1990. With Rs 60,000 in savings, he along with two brothers started SSI on January 1, 1991. SSI was started as a training institution and for a good part of its history was known as a provider of quality training in IT.
"At that time the knowledge gap between India and US in the database segment was two years," he says. Leading training institutions were then focusing on Cobol and dBase.
Kalpathi looked at more advanced database tools like Oracle and this required counselling students on the future of the industry. The effort paid off. In the first year his classes were running full.
"We did a serious SWOT analysis at the end of the second year and were convinced that we had a great business and that it was a cash cow," Kalpathi says.
SSI went public in 1994 and SSI's first franchisee office was opened in 1997. "Entering software services was the only logical step forward," he notes.
More recently, the education business of SSI was hived off and merged with Aptech. SSI has also announced that it will merge with the Bangalore-based Scandent.
The merger will be completed by August or September this year and Kalpathi will cease to hold any official position in the company. "Even after renouncing my office at SSI, I will continue to go for customer meets in the US, " he says. He will also continue to be on the board of the new company.
His medium-term sales target for the new entity is $250 million. "With the merger with Scandent, we are already looking at $100 million by the end of this financial year. Since we are growing faster than the industry, the $250 million target is not very far off," he confides.
What's next on Kalpathi's agenda? Floating his own venture capital fund "� and waking up at 3:30 am three days in a week for a 21- km run.
