Forget Cyberabad, APEX gets going in coastal Andhra

Very few people know about APEX Solutions Limited, the first and the biggest software unit in coastal Andhra, functioning in an ultra-modern building at Vengalayapalem, six kilometres from Guntur.

In fact, the company chose to be based out of Guntur and not the high profile Cyberabad. Barring a small unit in Vizag, the company is the only software unit in coastal Andhra.

APEX Solutions provides solutions to the publishing industry, with more than 100 customers from all over the world. In the last five years, the company has completed 120 projects, achieving a 1,000 per cent increase in work turnover.

The company though prefers maintaining a low profile as was witnessed in the recent celebrations of its fifth anniversary, which was wholly an internal affair.

Started in 1998 by the renowned Crane Group with 30 software professionals, the company now employs 340 professionals, most of whom hail from Guntur and the rest from Vijayawada.

APEX executive director S Narendra Kumar said, "Ours is a joint venture with Apex CoVantage ePublishing Solutions, Herendon, Virginia, US. The American company wanted us to start our unit in Hyderabad or Chennai. But my grandfather and founding chairman of Crane Group, Grandhi Subba Rao, did not agree for it. He told the US company bosses that the Crane group was determined to make Guntur a hub of software activities. The American firm gave in ultimately."

"In the first year, we handled just two projects," he said. "During the last five years, we have completed 120 projects, achieving a 1,000 per cent increase in work turnover. At present, we are working on 15 projects," he said.

"The company's relentless pursuit of excellence for maximum quality data, best value for money and timely delivery of solutions has made it very popular with customers in the US, Europe and New Zealand and this has paid rich dividends for the company," he said.

The customers, numbering over 100, include foreign academic and research libraries, archival institutions, trade publishers, scientific and professional associations and government agencies, he added.

"The American firm has facilities in Hyderabad, Chennai and Rajkot," he said. "But it selected our Guntur facility for the Best Operations Improvement Award for 2003," Kumar said. He said the company had turned around after some mistakes it committed in 2002 and performed badly that year.

The company offers XML-based editorial and pre-press solutions under BPO, citations linking, retrospective conversions, data sourcing, acquisitions and management, DTD development and customisation, specifications development, work flow analysis, indexing, linking, OCR, re-keying and scanning.

These solutions save a lot of time, energy and conversion costs for customers. The XML-based publishing system is an integrated end-to-end production solution for books, manuscripts and journals. It improves bottomline for high maintenance abstracting, indexing and copy editing, adding more valuable intellectual content to them.

Automated conversion technology turns publication's reference citation into interactive links, creating highly accurate parsed XML-encoded bibliographic citations. It also delivers in any format "� XML, SGML, DHTML, HTML, DTD, PDF, OEB "� proprietary specialised solutions for newspapers, bibliographic records and manuscripts.

The technology simplifies content supply processes, maximises the data value by making it the most current information available anywhere, and also simplifies production with a single data format inflow at the front end of work flow.

Kumar said that the company's human resources development policy of offering the staff opportunities to improve their personal, professional and financial standing had worked wonders for the firm.

The Crane Group, besides APEX, also includes the Crane Betel Nut Works, the Virat Crane Industries Limited, the Virat Crane Agri Tech, the Durga Dairy Limited, the Vilas Finance, and the Srivatsa Food Products.

The group provides direct employment to about 3,000 people and indirect employment to 15,000 people.