Ashok Soota announces new business venture ''Happiest Minds''
Wednesday, 06 April 2011, 01:47 IST   |    3 Comments
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Ashok Soota announces new business venture ''Happiest Minds''
Bangalore: Former MindTree co-founder Ashok Soota announced setting up a new business venture - Happiest Minds Technologies Limited- to provide a slew of IT services to global firms. "Happiest Minds will focus on new emerging technologies like cloud, social CRM (customer relationship management), unified communications, mobility, business intelligence and analytics," Soota. Soota, a former Wipro Vice-Chairman, resigned from MindTree, a Bangalore-based leading IT solutions and product engineering services firm, March 31 on personal grounds. "We are setting a revenue target of $100 Million over the next five years with a global presence as a full IT services firm," Soota said at an impromptu media briefing. The new venture, which will begin operations in the next five months, will offer six lines of business spanning IT services, research and development services, product engineering services, remote infrastructure management, testing and consulting. On the source of funding the start-up, Soota said though he would be investing his personal funds initially as seed capital, he was in consultation with two venture capitalists to take equity stake in the company for kick-starting the operations. "I will raise funds by partially divesting my stake (11.1 percent) in MindTree, valued at 1,600 Crore (16 Billion), in due course to partially fund the new venture," Soota said. Clarifying that he did not have a non-compete agreement with MindTree, Soota said he was hopeful of attracting some top professionals in the industry to run the company, as he was already in touch with some of them. "We will have marketing offices in Mumbai and New Delhi, besides Bangalore. We have hired a Chennai-based marketing agency to work out the modalities," Soota pointed out. Noting that the U.S would be the main market for client acquisition, his new firm would also focus on the Indian market to generate 10-12 percent of business. "Besides large corporations, including Fortune 500 firms, we will target medium and small enterprises to offer our range of IT services," Soota added.
Source: IANS
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