B.V. Suresh Kumar always dreamt of being an entrepreneur in the IT domain. After a successful stint in the U.S. as a prime IT consultant to many reputed organisations, he felt a burning desire to offer some thing to our country. The idea of bringing a radical change in the prevailing government procurement process in the country inspired him to form a small team of technocrats to develop a web based ASP solution to not only support all aspects procurements but also to usher in much needed high level of transparency, clarity, and efficiency in various purchase functions. Thus was born Antares.

Like all businesses, Antares started life as an idea. The idea was to create an e-governance environment for conducting tender and auction activities using an electronic medium catering to benefit government departments that relied heavily on manual ways of tendering and auctioning. Headquartered in Bangalore, the IT capital of India, Antares took baby steps with a small team delivering winning results to clients, making use of their cutting edge technology know how coupled with rich domain expertise. Their innovative products for government sector found positive response from Government of Karnataka. Having won their confidence, Antares developed the web based product and met huge success. The team has since grown to a 400-strong high caliber work force spread across India and at strategic global locations delivering client-centric solutions.

The Small Steps towards Success

From its humble beginnings as a small software firm, Antares has evolved into a success story, and today boasts of an enviable list of clientele of the highest order and repute through out India. However initially, as perceived, it was not a rosy path ahead. There were days when team Antares lacked skilled personnel which hindered multi-department implementations; also there was inadequate IT and networking infrastructure in government institutions. In addition, Antares faced challenges pertaining to implementation of state-wide system; unclear regulations on e-procurement process and replicating the best practices from foreign countries to the Indian state setup. Enlightening on this, Suresh Kumar explains, “The high attrition rates in the IT segment is a major concern for companies like Antares and employee retention has become a big challenge. But,creating challenging product development environment, providing innovative benefits and performance linked incentives offered to the employees has helped us immensely in our retention efforts. Additionally, we took earnest efforts and started a state-of-the-art development centre in Bangalore with project offices in more than 10 locations. Not only this, we hired staff possessing strong domain experience, skills in analysis, R&D, design, product engineering, expertise in government compliance and quality assurance”.

With such competent team, Antares has carved a niche for itself in providing solutions and support that helps government departments make the transition from traditional to electronic tendering and auctioning. “At Antares, our goal is to aid departments adopt effective ways to conduct procurement activities adhering to government procurement guidelines and compliance rules with support for highest level of security. To accomplish this, we employ resources and use innovation to help business transform and integrate e-enabled capabilities,” he adds.

Evidently, team Antares goes that extra mile to help their clients by listening to their every need, explaining and suitably guiding them on the usage of the products and the services. Adding up to this, Suresh avers, “Any superior or excellent product will not survive in the market and not succeed without customer support.