Ice People: Vishnu Dusad

A good office counts

Vishnu Dusad

Nucleus Software Exports managing director Vishnu Dusad thinks it is very important to have a good office. The realisation dawned on him when he recently moved the Rs 80 crore banking software and services company to the Rs 25 crore office complex that he's built in Noida on the outskirts of the capital.

"It's not leased or rented property. But it's our own space: we bought the land and built the office," says Dusad with a tinge of pride.

"The clients' reaction to it has said it all. I did not realise that office space makes such an impact," he adds. The complex is spread over several acres and Dusad hopes to keep adding blocks to the building as the company grows.

To be sure, growth hasn't been an issue for the company except in the year of the Gulf War and SARS when business dipped by a few crores.

"Yes, we saw a decline as 30 per cent of our business comes from countries like Singapore, Hong Kong and the Philippines that were affected by SARS," he says. The company is also dependent on Korea, Japan and Taiwan for another 45 per cent of its business.

And that is what Dusad is raring to change. He is aggressively hawking his banking products in the US and Europe. Last year, Nucleus Software got its first break with an American bank which bought one of its products.

And now the company's business head in Japan has been shifted to New Jersey in the US to grow its business in the US. More recently, it bagged a contract to implement its end-to-end loan solution product in a company in Italy. Dusad is suddenly bullish about these markets.

"If we crack the market in the developed parts of the world, the company will gain substantial momentum," he observes. He says he's confident of selling his products in the US and Europe; "60 to 70 per cent of retail loans in India are using Nucleus products," he claims.

Though Dusad, an Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, graduate, set up a banking services partnership firm in 1983, only in 1995 did Nucleus Software Exports get into products. And in the last 10 years the company has grown so rapidly that Dusad does not find any time to pursue his hobby: sketching.

"Last week I did try my hand at a street scene in Jaipur but could not finish it," he smiles. However, what he does manage to do is to read voraciously.

Currently, he's absorbed in Swami Vivekanand's 'Karmayoga,' switching in between to CK Prahlad's 'Fortune At the Bottom of the Pyramid.'