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Strategies & Market Trends : India Coffee House -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mohan Marette who wrote (9823)	11/28/1999 1:54:00 PM
From: Mohan Marette	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12475

Meet 'homeboy' Gaurav Dhillion (Co-Founder & CEO) Informatica MOVERS & SHAKERS By Michael Moeller November 24, 1999 Gaurav Dhillon: Helping Managers Make Sense of the Data Deluge (He's CEO of Informatica, one of the hottest software companies to hit Silicon Valley in years. Can he now entice the dot-coms? ) If you met Gaurav Dhillon when he was in the eighth grade, it's doubtful you would have picked him to one day be the founder of one of the fastest growing software companies in Silicon Valley. The mischievous kid habitually sat in the back of classrooms at school in his native India -- laughing and joking and throwing paper airplanes. "There are two kinds of students: The one that sits up front and takes notes and the other one that sits in the back of the class and fools around. I am the one in the back of the class," says Dhillon, the founder and CEO of Informatica Corp. Dhillon's days of hanging out in the back of the room have long since passed. These days you will find the 34-year-old working at least 14 hours a day, six days a week as the CEO of one of the hottest software companies to hit Silicon Valley in years. ====================== Making a profit is important to Dhillon, and Informatica was profitable the first quarter it reported its results ====================== Dhillon and Diaz Nesamoney, his roommate and Informatica's president, started the company in Los Angeles in 1993 using a National Science Foundation grant of $50,000. It was originally a technology consulting company. But after repeatedly seeing Fortune 500 companies struggle with huge volumes of business information, the two sold off the consulting business. They focused instead on creating a software system designed to let company managers combine reams of data and information into a single program. The product was launched three years ago. Nearly anywhere you turn, the computing systems inside a company are a mishmash of old and new technologies -- many totally incompatible with one another. And while corporate applications from software publishers such as Oracle Corp. and SAP help companies better manage individual systems like manufacturing, they also flood managers with too much information. Informatica's PowerMart and PowerCenter data-mining applications remedy that by enabling managers to combine data from multiple systems and view it all together to get the whole picture of a company's business -- from manufacturing and finance to human resources. The seemingly geeky software has been a hit. The company's customer list includes such heavyweights as Gateway Computer, Morgan Stanley, and Purina Mills. Last quarter, Informatica's revenues of $16 million grew by 21% from the previous quarter and more than 100% when compared with the third quarter of 1998. Net income was $804,000. Bucking the trend of recent IPOs, Informatica, which went public in April, was profitable the first quarter it reported its results. Making a profit is important to Dhillon "We sat back and said that either we could waste the money or we could be profitable, and wasting money is something you never do," says Dhillon. ======================== "Gaurav is the type of guy that will buy you a beer and leave his credit card at the bar for everyone" ======================== That's his style. Lifelong friends and current Informatica customers say Dhillon is one of the most down-to-earth people they know. At a recent user conference -- Informatica's first -- Jay Vetsch, director of global information delivery for Carlson Wagonlit, said that Dhillon is very attentive to customers. He even traveled to Minnesota to Carlson's head office to personally deliver product plans and listen to suggestions from Vetsch and his crew. "Gaurav is the type of guy that will buy you a beer and leave his credit card at the bar for everyone," say Vetsch. While Dhillon might have appeared to be a fun-loving kid back in Ludhiana, India, where he grew up, it's clear that he was already working on building up the skills that would be useful years later in running a company. Friends like Rajan Agarwal, who went to school with Dhillon, said he would spend hours taking things apart to see how they worked. Now he has to apply the same level of concentration to making sure Informatica isn't a flash in the pan. Microsoft Corp. and Oracle are moving into the data-analysis market. And Informatica's challenge for the coming year or two will be to make the leap into the Internet space and make customers of the dot-com companies. According to Dhillon, plans call for Informatica to work closely with so-called application service providers to make sure its products can help aggregate information about online businesses as well as they handle brick-and-mortars. With those challenges looming, you won't catch Dhillon fooling around. businessweek.com (Moeller covers technology for Business Week from Silicon Valley)