The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.
January - 2007 - issue > Company Profile
India's Cisco: The Money Revolving Organization
Aritra Bhattacharya
Let’s say you’ve been facing this problem since a long time. Your employees have complained enough of the Internet connection’s inability to handle huge file transfers, and you have decided to apply for another leased line connection. Despite the immense funds-crunch, you have managed, barely, to ready a cheque for the same…when, hold on, you realize that all the people in the office don’t need the same bandwidth. There are only a few who access the web for the mammoth file transfers; others just use it to check mails, and could make do with lower speeds. So if you could divert the excess bandwidth and speed from their end to the former’s…
MROTEK’s bandwidth manager looks to capture the market putting the same thought into action. The company that started as a reselling agency today manufactures networking products for the emerging markets, and is currently in negotiations with one of the country’s top telecom service providers for deploying its products with their connections.
Since the inception of its R&D facility in 2004, the company has commercialized five products that include, apart from the bandwidth manager, Fast Ethernet Media Converter and Ethernet Powered Switch.
Its first product though came back in 1998, when CMD Sarangan Narayanan sensed the need for a line drawer, architected the same and took the idea to HCL. “They liked it immensely and ordered 100 line drawers right away,” he recalls. During those days, third party selling still formed a major part of MROTEK’s business. Buoyed by the success of RAD products, of which MROTEK was the distributor, and the latter’s own line drawers, Narayanan decided to set up a manufacturing plant in a joint-venture with RAD. The effort fetched dividends; the period between 1998 and 2000 saw the company’s revenues increase from Rs.25 crore to Rs.100 crore. But with the historic slowdown in 2000, returns took a nosedive. Had the investment, that had gone into setting up a manufacturing plant been invested for the establishment of an R&D facility, the events could’ve panned out quite differently.
Agrees Narayanan: “We could’ve become a Rs.500 crore company by now…”
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