| In its first year in 1997, Dilip Dubey’s IT services company landed one contract for $500. |
| |
| He had quit a secure job as an engineer with General Motors Corp., and his wife, Sonal, had quit her job as a program manager with Delphi Corp. to have their first baby. |
| |
| “Everything was at risk,” he said. At risk, but not in doubt. |
| |
| Dubey, the CEO, and his partner, Anurag Shrivastava, the chief technology officer, were sure they could make a go of it by targeting small- and medium-size businesses that established IT firms seemed to overlook. “We didn’t go half-baked. We knew what we were doing. With larger customers, there are a lot of competitors,” said Dubey. “But when you go to mid-market companies, there’s not much competition.” Events thus far have proved them right. |
| |
| Today their company, Netlink Software Group America Inc., has about 1,000 employees — half in Bhopal, India, and about 380 in Southeast Michigan. It had $14 million in revenue in 2005, doubled that to $28 million last year and projects revenue of $60 million this year. |
| |
| Customers include Starbucks, Subway, GM, Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler L.L.C., with whom Netlink landed its first major contract in 1999. |
| |
| “With such a big client reference, life became a lot easier,” said Dubey. |
| |
| Netlink’s targeted niches include the auto-supply chain, health care, retail and high-tech companies. Between 40 percent and 45 percent of revenue is auto-related. |
| |
| “We’re thrilled with that. We have no hesitation to have a large auto-related business,” said Dubey. |
| |
| At the end of July, Netlink opened its new headquarters in Madison Heights, a headquarters the state of Michigan won from a competing offer in Denver with a tax credit of $3.6 million granted in March. The credit requires Netlink to add 298 jobs over the next seven years. |
| |
| Eighty of those promised jobs have already been added, said Dubey, to fulfill a new contract that will be announced soon by a global tier-one auto supplier. He said it will add $10 million in revenue a year. |
| |
| Netlink opened an office in Dallas in 2004, one in Denver in 2006 and one in Miami in May though the acquisition of a small IT firm, VINPlus Inc., and plans to open an office in California next year. |
| |
| Dubey said the company expects to close on two more acquisitions in the fourth quarter this year. One is a Michigan-based company with about $11 million in revenue. The other is a European company with about $8 million in revenue. Dubey said he plans to use the European company, which has offices in the U.K. and Germany, as a platform to open offices next year in France, Belgium, Italy, Spain and Poland. |
| |
| Jonathan James, vice president of global marketing for Troy-based Syntel Inc., praised Netlink’s focus on growing its European business and looking to small companies “who don’t have the IT budget that companies like Syntel generally look for. |
| |
| “There are three waves of demand in outsourcing,” he said. “One is (Forbes) Global 2000 companies, the companies everyone is chasing because they spend so much on IT. No. 2 is the European sector, which is 12 to 24 months behind the U.S. in IT outsourcing. No. 3 is from small and midsized businesses.” |
| |
| James said there is strong global demand for IT outsourcing, particularly the niche known as business process outsourcing, which Netlink focuses on. |
| |
| “With global BPO, we’re looking at annual growth of 25 to 30 percent,” he said. |
| |
| Dubey and Shrivastava met as undergrads in India in 1986, then went their separate ways. Dubey enrolled at the University of Michigan to get his master’s degree in mechanical engineering and went on to GM. Shrivastava went to Clemson to study human-computer interfacing. |
| |
| Dubey spent three years at GM while working on his Ph.D. in international business at Wayne State University, doing his thesis on teamwork in global businesses. |
| |
| Shrivastava joined the Paris-based Capgemini Group as an IT consultant. |
| |
| In 1997, they decided to reunite and form a company. |
| |
| “I had a great job at GM, but you could see where you were going to end up in 30 years. It didn’t seem exciting enough,” said Dubey, who said the division of labor was clear-cut. |
| |
| “He was the technology brains. I was the process and business side of things, and we pulled it together.” |
| |
| Jim Radzicki is vice president and chief information officer for Arizona-based Direct Alliance, a wholly owned subsidiary of TeleTech Holdings Inc., a billion-dollar global provider of IT outsourcing. |
| |
| Radzicki said he needed to hire a contractor about a year-and-a-half ago to help with an internal project. A board member at TeleTech recommended he contact Netlink. |
| |
| “We gave them a call, compared them to some competitors and chose them. We’ve since extended the relationship twice, and as other projects arise, I’m sure we’ll use them on those, too. |
| |
| “With some contractors, they come in, deploy and are gone. Then, you get nickeled and dimed on follow-ups. But we built a relationship with them. They did knowledge-transfer to our employees. They didn’t just throw something over the wall.” |
| |
| One preferred model for Netlink is to take over a customer’s IT staff, down to making the customer’s employees its own. |
| |
| R.J. Wentz became an employee through the purchase of VINPlus, which did systems integration for auto dealers. He is now Netlink’s vice president of automotive retail operations in Madison Heights. |
| |
| “I was incredibly excited about their acquiring us. It provided us a resource pool that we didn’t have before,” said Wentz. “They invested money in us that let us do what we always thought we’d be capable of doing. I expected that. |
| |
| “What I didn’t expect — I’d worked for large organizations and expected to be stepping back into the corporate environment — was we were all treated as family by Dilip and Anurag.” |
| |
| Tom Henderson: (313) 446-0337, |
