Ashank Desai is not talking through his hat when he says his firm would like to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange possibly in the near future. Hard work and channelising his intelligence has helped this Britona boy, a past pupil of the Goa Engineering College (1968-72), as he aims for the stars. Today, his firm has ten offices in India, and branches in the US, the UK, Singapore, Malaysia. It also has partners in the Australia-New Zealand region. Desai was a past head of the Indian software umbrella body, NASSCOM, and was also one of its founding members.
Mastek (or, as its longer name goes, Management and Software Technology) was started in 1982. Three classmates who had studied at the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad decided to launch a software firm, and their professors backed their efforts. That was a time when everyone was skeptical of the computer software field. "Every one would politely ask us, 'What is this software? Do you think there's scope in that?' Why don't you management consulting or manufacturing. But we said, 'We'll try'," recalls Desai, who bagged the second-place for the Goa Engineering College's (Farmagudi) in the University of Bombay.
It was five to six years of very trying times. At times, they worked without taking a pay-packet home. But nothing works like hard work. Take a look at some of the products that Mastek can claim credit for churning out. Bechtel, the multinational US-headquartered contracting firm, also has taken Mastek's help to ensure that its huge staff is being productively used. Omron, a company in medical electronics, has leant on this Indian firm too. Its salesmen do their rounds, tap in a few keys of the customer's computer, offer a demo of the products through the Internet, book orders the same way, and print out a purchase order after checking out latest prices. In cyberspace.
Mamis is an Indian ERP product. GoldMine is another product that computerises distribution. Picador is meant for stock-brokers, and Indonesia and Malaysia are using it too. Mastek's latest is JAAL, an Internet-based product. Jaal is Hindi for Web. JAAL is also Just An Application Language. It allows you to build an application on the Internet. "When you want to build a complete application based on the Internet, you would like to access your database. It's like Powerbuilder. It's a kind of Powerbuilder for the Internet," says Ashank Desai. "Our main focus is business application. We'd like to make businesses more efficient by using information technology," Desai told this correspondent.
Life was a struggle at first. After doing his Bachelor's in mechanical engineering from Farmagudi, he did an M.Tech at the Indian Institute of Technology and then went to the Indian Institute of Management. His team of friends, who jointly set up Mastek, decided to stick together for three years, so that the bond would remain. They also decided against taking up plum jobs, and instead opted for jobs where they would get the experience. In 1982, the Indian software industry was very small, worth Rs 20-30 crores or a little more. This year, India's software export itself is going touch Rs 6-7,000 crores. Our domestic market is another Rs 4500 crore. It's almost an 11,000 crore industry.
Mastek's first assignment came from Richardson Hindustan, now called Proctor & Gamble. After satisfying their clients, they got orders from Citibank, Hindustan Lever and other such big names. "Being in Bombay, you could get a lot of jobs," says Desai. Step by step, they cashed in on the changes that came to the world of computers and to India. Software became standardised with the arrival of the PC (personal computer) around 1985. Then, from doing customised software, they shifted to making 'packages' -- which were available off the counter for large number of users having the same needs.
By 1988, India allowed the import of foreign software, which gave them access to the latest technology. Later, Mastek tied up with Ingress, which gave them technology of relational-databases. (A database is a collection of information on a subject that organises data in tables. The relational database can combine information from different tables, and present it to the user.) Then came the era of software export. But for the first seven years, Mastek was known for making a success through the domestic market. "Most of the companies go for software exports. Which is good and challenging. But the domestic market is tough, and not that profitable. So there are not many success stories who have grown in domestic software and then gone in for exports. If anybody admires us, it is for that," recalls Desai. Going into exports was also costly at that stage. "Honestly, it was just that we had no money to go abroad. Let's put it that way," says Desai. Today, Mastek finds it profitable to hire Americans in the US, and British in the UK, to head their operations there. But that's another story.
Their early packages included one for financial accounting for small businesses called Finac, and another for stock-brokers called Strac, later called Excalibur. As Ashank puts it: "In Mastek, neither myself nor my colleagues are sons of business people. So we are first generation into business. We had no idea about how to do business. As you know, in Goa, doing business is not very well admired. People prefer 'steady' jobs. Our venture was taken with a luke-warm approach, like 'What is this guy upto'." Exports were started in the mid-eighties. Their first job was for Singapore, and Mastek's tiny 350 square feet office in Prabhadevi was something the firm wanted to conceal from the foreign partners, lest they find it too "small" a firm. But soon quality triumphed over wealth and assets.
From Singapore, the next stop was the US, in 1989. "Then we went to other countries," recalls Ashank. Mastek's style is to start operations in the US with an American face, and in the UK with a British touch. It doesn't believe in having small and tiny offices abroad. "We've said wherever we go, we'll have our own company. So we have a subsidiary Majesco, Mastek's subsidiary in the US, or Mastek-UK or Mastek-Asia Pacific. Not only that, each of the heads of these organisations are local people," says he. As Desai explains: "We do this, because if you have to be high- value addition you need to have a local presence. A local flag."
"We need to understand the American way of doing business," says he. Returns are coming in too. Over the past six years, Mastek has grown "very fast" in exports, touching almost 100 per cent growth rate, double the average Indian export growth in software. "In 1992-93, we were just three crores exports. Last year, we were 63 crores, and this year we are hoping for 100 crores," says he. Mastek later became a public company. It was the first software company to take advantage of changed rules which allowed firms to sell their shares at a premium. "We went public in 1992, just a week before Ayodhya. We were in such a bad shape, because everything was closed. Banks were closed, and on the last day of our issue a bandh was announced. Yet our issue was issue oversubscribed two-and-half times," says Desai.
Foreign Institutional Investors (FIIs) today own 30% of Mastek's shares, the maximum permissible. "Now 30 percent of my shares are held by Morgan Stanley, Jardine Flemings," says Ashank. "It's good in a way. These guys want us to run a company on a professional basis. They would like our accounts to be audited in an American way. All these things are important." Mastek has plans of going global, and hopefully plans to quote its shares on the New York Stock Exchange, or NASDAC. At that time, having a professional way of doing and reporting business - - with a high order of transparency and openness -- would surely help. Could Ashank have made it from Goa? "If you want to start a big software company, you need a big market, and obviously that does not exist here," he says. Bombay also is much more professional in its ways of doing business. Getting quality and good people, including from the IITs, is easier in Bombay. Finally, Bombay is a happening place, where export delegations often buzz in and out.
"But, having said that, if somebody is coming only to build export-oriented business, with export connections, then you can start in Goa," says Ashank. He is keen to push the possibility of Goa doing business with countries that shared certain common languages like Brazil or Portugal. Would he opt to set up something here himself? Mastek started its next R&D centre in Pune, and has another office in Chennai a couple of years ago. "Goa is just come up. For me it would be a fourth unit, so right now I'm not just ready to start something. But I'm sure Goa is some place where we will come. Goa is a place I would like to have... the way it is growing now, with all these people are into computers. I would definitely come one day," says he. For that, Goa would of course need better telecom and power services. As of now, Mastek has done work for firms like Goa Shipyard and Western India Shipyard. Ashank, a founder-member of NASSCOM the national-level software federation, headed that body in 1996. He credits NASSCOM with lobbying to improve India's telecom network, promoting Indian software worldwide through fairs and directories, lowering software import duties to give Indians access to the latest technology, and promoting anti-"piracy" campaigns.
Indian software is set to go places, and though earlier its competition was mainly on the cost-advantage, it is now "moving up the value ladder". India today has some sixty to seventy software companies with the ISO-9000 standard. Ashank feels India's headstart in software comes from certain factors -- our large pool of scientific and engineering graduates (India has more computer science graduates passing out each year than the US now), a rigorous engineering college filtering system, Indian's mathematical abilities, and the fact that there are over 700 "vibrant" software companies operating in this country. "We're good in Mathematics. We invented zero. So the Y2K (Year 2000) problem is because of us," jokes Ashank, adding: "We are also good in English and that's important because most of the software is in English."
Ashank Desai, who spent some time at the Goa University during his recent X'mas visit to Goa, would like to see students getting familiar with computers right from Std II or III, if possible. He feels the syllabus needs to be adapted to make students understand how exactly computers can be used in fields like manufacturing, banking and insurance. Business applications, he points out, make up 80% of the software market, and yet Indian educationists focus very little on this field. We, in our country, have too much of a focus on programmers -- and too little emphasis on people who actually use computers. Indian students don't get enough computer time, he says. Software students need to learn more than just programming, says he.
Ashank Desai advocates that the businessman and proprietor familiarise himself with computers and use them, before expecting his staff to do so. "That's not happening. When you have a bath, you can't tell somebody else to open the tap," says he. "One of my areas (of interest) is to popularise computers in organisations itself. Even in organisations, computer usage is not high. If we don't use computer, we'll remain behind. Banks are completely changing. We need a completely different look at the world. Otherwise we'll remain poor forever," says he. Software should be used to India's advantage too. While exports are fine, and lucrative, software must be made to serve the home market, he feels. Or else, foreigners will take all the benefit of the smartness of Indians in the software field, at cheap rates. "All the iron ore went from Goa to Japan, and we bought cars. In software and the Internet, we should not repeat that," says he.
