Meet Rajul Garg, co-founder and chief operating officer of Induslogic. The software development company is headquartered in Washington DC and has a development centre at Noida on the outskirts of New Delhi which employs 500 people. Among its clients are Cingular Wireless, Dell, Schlumberger and JP Morgan. Mind you, Garg is just 27 years old and he is shooting for the skies. By 2007, he expects Induslogic's current annual turnover of $15 million to touch $50 million. The company, set up in April 2000, is expected to grow by 100 per cent a year for the next few years, says Garg.
Some of that growth is expected to come from an acquisition that Induslogic will announce this month. Predictably, Garg is tightlipped on the name of the company as the formalities may take a month to complete.
Induslogic, which focuses on commercial grade enterprise software in the telecom and finance sectors, hopes to enter the wireless application services segment by piggyriding on the new company it acquires.
"After this we may look at least one more acquisition in the wireless domain," says Garg. Why? Because writing applications for wireless technology is the growth area, with products like mobile phones, organisers and the Blackberry becoming popular, he explains.
Garg recalls his initial years when he set up his smart card technology business called Pinelabs in 1998. He had just graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi.
At Pinelabs, he conceived of and created the now-famous Petro card (cash card) for Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited (BPCL). In 2000, he made Pinelabs a subsidiary of Induslogic, the company he floated with some of his IIT seniors. Induslogic was backed by Draper Atlantic, an American venture capital fund.
Pinelabs continues to work in the smart card domain while Induslogic is looking aggressively at the software services segment and wants to further grow in the US market. Garg says the company is professionally run which leaves him with ample time to travel with his wife. His favourite getaway in India is Shimla.
Every three months he also goes to the US for strategy and future planning sessions with the company's CEO. With whatever time is left after putting in 10-hour days at work is spent playing squash at the IIT.
