Interviews

Rajiv Kumar Managing Director, Total IT Solutions Pvt. Ltd.

by VARINDIA 2010-03-10

Operating out of the Indian software solutions market, Total IT Solutions provides customized solutions for the management of, and access to, e-resources. Having vast experience in dealing with prestigious clients, it has also shown expertise in developing distinctive library portals, ILS, Search Solutions and other software solutions in terms of integrating and accessing online e-resources. VARIndia speaks to Rajiv Kumar, Managing Director, Total IT Solutions Pvt. Ltd., on the company’s expansion plans.

Give us a brief description about Total IT Solutions?

Total IT Solutions is among the top two companies in the Software and Search solutions for large academic, research institutes in India. The image that Total IT Solutions has among its customers or the target market is of a company that is involved in developing Unique Search Solution for Libraries. It is also committed to IT innovations into the library and making e-resources and other resources available in the libraries to its patrons.

What are the product ranges you have?

Our main products and services are: (a) Total Library Software System (Library Automation and Management Software) with Internet Based OPAC; (b) Marketing of EJ – Server, a web-based search solution/search engine; (c) E-Resources Management and Search

Solutions: First company in Asia to develop and market this solution. It is a customized e-resources management and search solution to manage and provide search on physical resources along with subscribed e-resources of the library; (d) Global Periodicals.com: (launching this year) First Web portal to provide online purchase of subscriptions of e-journals, e-books, online databases; (e) E-Quest: Digital Library Hosting, Management and Search Solution to manage digitized contents of an institute. Only company in India to have this kind of software solution; (f) Developing a Library Portal for our clients and developing web portal for a group of libraries/consortium.

What is an eLibrary?

eLibrary is an information portal providing a single point of access to all electronic resources held by the Library at the University. By using the portal, you can either go directly to a resource, or to search selected resources simultaneously, with the option to save your favourite resources and search results. All the resources available via the eLibrary have been selected because they are known to be accurate and reliable. The button within each record will link you to the full text article, wherever available.

Brief us about your presence in various geographies in India.

We have our corporate office in New Delhi and branch offices in Mumbai, Lucknow, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Chennai and Bangalore. The team handling a particular region does the promotion of our products and services directly to the end-customers. While for our overseas expansion we have recently appointed our distributors in Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, now the next step will be to appoint distributors in the Middle East and Thailand.

What kind of growth you are experiencing?

The kind of growth we have received no other company in this industry has achieved this kind of growth in the last three years. We are aiming to capture 5% of the total market in the year 2008-09, 10% in 2009-10 and 15% in 2010-11.

How would you like to differentiate yourself from your competitors?

As we are operating in a very niche market segment, i.e. large academic and research libraries, we really do not have much competition as most of the products are first launched by our company only and in most of the cases we are the only company in India to offer these software and search solution. The current market that is available for new entrants for the year 2008 is around US$800 million, assuming that 85% market is still there to buy EMRSS subscription.

What are the new challenges that you face?

The single biggest challenge before us is to educate our customers that, apart from buying and spending huge sums of money on subscriptions, they should also look at having search solutions so that the money they are spending is better utilized and they can increase the usage of resources in which each year they spend around Rs.3 to Rs.5 crore for subscription.