

While Gurjeet handles research and development, Manoj is in charge of global data recovery service. Initially, I was very nervous about the move, but now I head the sales department for the company’s international business. In fact, the sky-rocketing growth that we witnessed after 1999 prompted me to start my own sales and marketing operation in the same year. It also opened up other avenues as we started to look at international markets. We surged in popularity as the media covered our recovery solutions. This was the time my company took off because the solutions that we offered for the problems created by the virus provided a major push to the business. It affected computers across the globe, primarily in Asian countries.
#Stellar data recovery gurgaon address software
The turnaround happened in April 1996, when chernobyl, a computer virus that corrupts the software responsible for booting the system, broke out. The business was growing in terms of product offerings, but we weren’t selling enough to reach profitability levels. I lived on a small salary, which was just enough to provide for petrol in my bike, three meals and a few smokes a day. Stellar barely managed to survive during these years. Collection of revenue from the distributor became a huge problem and required constant monitoring.įor me, the entrepreneurial struggle lasted longer than usual. Though the move proved a big help, it brought its own set of challenges. Within eight months of starting the firm, I let out the sales and marketing of Stellar to a distribution firm. Since I did not like people bad-mouthing my products, I decided to outsource sales.
#Stellar data recovery gurgaon address professional
Initially, the prospective clients would openly criticise my products, with a senior IT professional going so far as to tell me that it was a useless idea and nobody needed it. Soon I realised that my core competence was technology, not sales. I was quite naïve when I started but have learnt from my mistakes. There were many instances when they would take copies of my products, but when I approached them for placing an order, they returned these, probably after using them. The managements were not ready to accept that the organisations needed data recovery tools. The companies used to appreciate my products but they were not willing to buy them. It was very tough to sell software products in India in the early 1990s as there was no market for it. I started facing problems that I hadn’t anticipated. I was overjoyed, but the real struggle was yet to begin. When I provided them with the solution, the company bought my product. They had damaged a floppy disk and wanted to retrieve data from it. My first client was Modi Xerox and I earned my first revenue from the company within eight days of starting operations.

When I started, I only saw firms as potential customers, but today my client base includes both corporates as well as individuals. Stellar Information Systems provides software for data recovery for all major operating systems and renders services including data protection, back-up and erasing, in addition to providing recovery tools for e-mails, digital media, CDs and DVDs. Today, I have come a long way on the innovation front. The feedback that we got from companies resulted in our biggest innovation in the first year itself-a hardware data recovery product. As I started visiting companies to sell my product, I found that the data recovery problem was not restricted to floppies but was widespread in the computer operating system. Within six months, we had developed a floppy data recovery tool.

All of us quit our jobs in less than a year of starting it. They agreed to join me and in August 1993, we set up our data recovery firm, Stellar Information Systems, in Delhi. However, I was convinced about the brilliance of the idea and discussed it with two of my friends, Gurjeet Singh and Manoj Dhingra, who had been in college with me and were working at the time. However, they brushed off my proposal, saying that though they could market such a product, they were not keen to develop it as it did not seem feasible. The concept got me excited and I pitched the idea to my employers as I believed I could do something similar for them. One day, while I was going through an American technology magazine, I came across a product which aimed at recovering data from floppies. So I did engineering in computer science from the Pune University and, after graduating in 1992, I took up a job in a multimedia company, LML Limited, in Delhi. I belong to a family of lawyers, but wasn’t keen to take it up as a profession.
