Taking the path of success

MEET YOUR ENTREPRENEUR

Former US president Richard M Nixon once said, "Unpredictability is the greatest asset a leader can have." This is very true of Pavan Nigam, founder, chairman and CEO of Cendura Corporation.

Nigam's second start-up company Cendura Corporation was founded in 2001 with the purpose of helping IT organisations reduce the escalating costs of managing and supporting complex, distributed applications.

The company's Cohesion application management suite provides out-of-the-box customer value through its revolutionary application blue-printing platform.

Nigam first joined Intel and then Silicon Graphics, the cutting-edge tech company under Jim Clarke. After Clarke left SGI in 1994, Nigam and his team were left behind to execute a challenging project "" the interactive television. It was a huge project and quite a financial disaster.

Costing $200 million to build and employing over 200 people, it did not make any profit. Clark later convinced Nigam to join him to co-found Healtheon in 1996, an online healthcare company.

"At Healtheon, our goal was to provide healthcare solutions, products and services. The company was dedicated to help maintain information technology systems at their optimum capability while increasing the quality of healthcare and minimising operational costs. But maintaining this company was not an easy task and, therefore, I left the company in 2000," Nigam recalls.

Healtheon went public in 1999, before the dotcom bust and Nigam cashed out, pretty rich in the bargain. After he left the company, Nigam went on a holiday for a year in Goa.

"While on holiday, I was restless not knowing what to do. And after considering several start-ups, I zeroed in on web application," he says.

That gave birth to Cendura "" the Mountain View start-up "" that helps companies monitor and manage the multiple applications running on their network.

Nigam started the company with mainly his own money in 2001. Since then, he has raised $15.5 million for it, with $8 million being raised recently led by NeoCarta Ventures.

Nigam incorporated Cendura in 2002 according to the norms of the more modest, post-Bubble era. "My first six employees worked for equity "" not cash. They built two pilot products before taking in their first $7.5 million round of venture backing. The company has managed to utilise only $4 million of that," he says.

Nigam says that his 80-member team in India was helping the company to cut costs and making it lucrative to venture capitalists. In India, Cendura works on software development and market research.

According to him, the entrepreneur in him existed right from the time he started working. "I have always been associated in leading various teams at various places. So I knew that one day I would be successful with my own company," he says.

Nigam, an IIT-Kanpur graduate, had started his career in Philips, selling bulbs and electronic gadgets. After working with them for some time, he went to the US for doing his masters in Computer Sciences.

A little known fact is that he was also selected to join the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) and also the Indian Institute of Management but then he wanted to be a self-made man and left both the opportunities.

Nigam says that his interest in negotiating transactions started by watching his father, who used to have a large electrical appliance store in Kanpur.

"I used to be at the store whenever I could. Even after school I used to rush back to the store and just hang around there after doing my home work. It used to fascinate me how deals were done and it was then that I decided that I would also do something on those lines, where I would have to do all the talking," he recalls.

Cendura recently announced the release of Cohesion 3.0, which delivers proactive, policy-based change, configuration and compliance management across complex, distributed enterprise infrastructures.

"The technical team at Cendura India has been an integral part our product development. In Cohesion 3.0, more than 50 per cent of the development work and over 80 per cent of the QA and testing work was carried out at the Hyderabad development centre," Nigam said.

Nigam makes it a point to stay with his family. He is also the coach of a nine-year-old girls' soccer team called 'Spirits'. "My daughter is also in the team and it is fun to be with them over the weekends. Till recently, I used to play a lot with my 12-year old son also but now he is too quick for me. And to counter this I have started to play golf with him," he says.

The game of chess has always been an integral part of him. "I used to be fascinated by the different moves and strategies that one has to come up with to be a winner. And a little bit of this I have also used in my life," he says. Apart from playing with his kids he is also a father who is keen on being with them when they are studying.

And his vision for Cendura is to create a large footprint for the company so that it could be deployed across the globe in as many corporations as possible.