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Dr. Total SecurityKesavardhanan Jayaraman

The anTi-viruS privaTe army

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In early 2005, six-month-old Katherine Emi would doze the night on a beanbag in her fa-

ther’s office room. The mop-haired code-writer, busy working furiously on a laptop, writing codes to kill viruses, would slog till 1:30 a.m., when most of the civilized world would have long taken to bed. As if participating in a relay, Emi’s mother, along with a colleague, would over the next three hours do a quality check on Dad’s programming skills, before sending out a report to Tokyo, in Japan. By the time the gang of three woke up, guys from the land of the rising sun would have sent in their feedback.

It was a punishing schedule that Kesavard-hanan Jayaraman, the founder of K7 Computing, and his nutritionist-turned-techie wife, Sheba Grace, got into to meet an anti-virus product re-quirement for the Japanese software publisher, Sourcenext. Those were troubled times. K7 was in a deep financial mess. Unable to withstand the prospect of no pay, six of its seven top-flight programmers scheduled to work on the project left the company. The seventh could not leave because he happened to be the founder and CEO.

Ultimately, 2003 turned out to be an epoch-making year. Japan triggered an avalanche of fortune for Kesavardhanan. During the next five years, he made money of the I have never seen before kind! It catapulted the company to pole position. This extraordinary story tells a remark-

able tale of a long hard haul, and ahead of it an-other tale of a flat grind. It’s a story worth telling.

In December that year, the US Army smoked out Saddam Hussein, President of Iraq from a bunker hole in the small town of Ad-Dawr.

Summer of 1991Let’s turn the clock back to the summer of 1991.

That year, India stood within striking dis-tance of bankruptcy. A suicide bomber assassi-nated a charismatic former prime minister, the Congress cobbled together a majority, and the economy looked like falling apart. In a moment of inspiration, the government of the day dusted the cobwebs of socialism to marry capitalism. Over the next 25 years, India scripted an amaz-ing transformation that is today a global case study. Into this maelstrom, K7 Computing wan-dered and blossomed.

Also in 1991, the world of computing be-gan to explode. People started to own personal computers. Unknown to them, a crisis loomed around the corner. Michelangelo, the celebrated virus, threatened to wipe away every scrap of information from computer desktops. Antivi-rus guru John McAfee predicted 5 million as the number. While later assessments proved him wrong, it was a momentary respite. Soon, deadly viruses swarmed, and someone needed

K7’s OdysseyFrom the time Homer’s epic The Odyssey narrated the story of Odysseus’ ten-year travel home from Troy, Odyssey has meant an epic journey.

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to kill it. The Norton group played the smiling assassin and came out with their Norton Anti-Virus for PC.

In the same year, a self-made 22-year-old stepped into the promising Indian market. The lad came to play a pivotal role in providing com-puter security over the next quarter of a centu-ry. His company, K7 Computing, offered cyber protection solutions to over 20 million clients, cutting across countries and continents. Its cus-tomer base included home users, governments, bankers, manufacturing units, utility compa-nies, retail players, healthcare houses, educa-tional institutions, telecom sector, and technol-ogy majors.

The 22-year-old carried a calling card that read Jayaraman Kesavardhanan. By no stretch of imagination can he be labeled a case of an over-night success.

Summer of 1984‘Keseven’, to family and friends, grew up in a small apartment in Madras’ upmarket Nungam-bakkam, once a top-notch residential area for Europeans. Most of the place’s main lanes, such as College Road, Haddows Road, and Sterling Road, are over 100 years old. The locality oozed tradition, but our man could care less.

His father, mother, brother, and sister made up a God-fearing Hindu family, and space was at a premium. Dad worked in the tyre business, and money wasn’t easy to come by: “We were

from the lower middle class.” The financial sta-tus, however, did not stop Senior from sending Junior to T Nagar’s Sir M. Venkatasubba Rao Ma-triculation Higher Secondary School. Keseven, however, did not turn out to be an outstanding academic. His stay at Venkatasubba Rao, from Class 3 to Class 10, between the years 1977 and 1984, went largely unnoticed, uncared, and unrecognized.

Well, it isn’t to say Keseven hated school; but going there didn’t exactly give him Goose-bumps either. English and Tamil were languages. “Do you need a school to learn them?” Science was reasonable. Histo-ry, with its irrelevant stories of Ashoka and Aurangzeb, got on his nerves. He could hardly relate to geography with its focus on crops, climate, and countries. If at all there was a subject he fell in love with, it was Mathematics. Numbers had him hooked. No surprises, indeed.

Keseven had no fancy ambitions and never thought of pursuing engineering or medicine, or the doormat CA. “Had I graduated in a pro-fessional course, I would have been the first in the family to do so.” He had strong views, and everything to him was binary, crystal clear. No wonder, in later years he would make a profes-sion out of 1 and 0!

Keseven took his school leaving ICSE exam in the Orwellian year of 1984. He was nowhere

When I am in a bad mood, I write codes.

He fell in love with mathematics. No wonder, in later years he would make a profession out of 1 and 0!

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in the percentile that could mark him as a scholar. But a life-changing event happened in April. Jayaraman Kesavardhanan fell in love.

During the summer holidays, riding an old bicycle, with a friend in tow, on North Usman Road Keseven chanced upon an of-fice whose name board read Computer Tech-

nological Institute. It was a training center recog-nized by the government of India. The teenagers walked up the staircase to the Institute wanting to know about the won-der machine. The director painstakingly explained to them about the power of computers.

“I was mesmerized at what the machine could do. The course fee of Rs 750 was a princely sum those days.” But Keseven, besotted by the course, wanted to study it, come hell or high water. His par-ents hesitated but soon agreed because they thought it would not only keep their son oc-cupied but also felt something useful would come out of it.

In that year, 1984, in distant America, Steve Jobs presented the first Macintosh to the world.

Love at First SightIn the class at the computer center, Teacher Pulikesi made the subject lively. Somewhere there Keseven found his calling. “I was hooked from the word go. I enjoyed ‘programming.’ When I wrote programs, I felt like teaching the computer what to do. Like you teach a kid on how to cross the road. After all, the computer is at best an enhanced calculator. It can add, subtract, multiply, divide, and also compare; but it does it at breathtaking speed. This excited me.”

The computer became Keseven’s favorite toy. Ev-ery waking hour he only thought about the equip-ment and how to make it work harder. Every sleep-ing moment he dreamt of computers and its date with common sense. It took over his being. A few years later he would worry about protecting it from alien worms.

Soon he mastered programming. His biggest plus: he could write codes in the snap of a finger. Mark it; his classmates were engineers, graduates, and seniors looking for career advancement. Keseven cracked a weeklong assignment in 30 minutes and hopped to the professor asking for more. Pulikesi gave him complicated problems thinking it would keep the teenager at bay; but no, the stocky kid would return soon having solved it by the hour.

The boy who would one day storm the world of anti-virus vaccines created a buzz with his speed. Now the cynosure of eyes, the 15-year-old enjoyed the attention. He got noticed for the first time in life.

In the early 90s, Cybermedia, an American start-up, turned to S

R Associates (SRA) in India for developing a product to solve configuration errors in hardware cards. On their part, SRA looked to K7 for help. However, the American Embassy showed no interest to honor Keseven with a visa. Five times in a row they rejected his application. Finally, the US government got interested in some form, and a Senator recommended visa for six people from SRA. The Embassy gave visas to all of them except to our man! The story didn’t end there.

One day, many months later, the managing director of Cybermedia met Keseven at the Madras Airport and

Lightning Kidhanded over a sample card for hardware correction. In four hours, Keseven cracked a problem, which had defied solution for 18 months. His famed ‘speed’ was on display. The American company opened the champagne bottle that night.

Instant hit

In a few weeks time, K7 Computing got the entire assignment and they worked off-shore, from India. A monthly retainer was agreed. The managing director of Cybermedia, repeatedly suggested Kesevan take an equity stake in the enterprise, but the mop-haired code writer refused.

Months later when the product was launched in the US it tuned out to be an instant hit. Cybermedia grew exponentially

and soon began poaching employees from K7. When the Internet wave happened, Cybermedia sold out to Network Associates who now owned the McAfee brand.

Soon Network floated a small entity called McAfee.com to squeeze value from the brand. This company worked with Sourcenext. Later when McAfee merged with Network Associates, Sourcenext chose to opt out of its arrangement with the McAfee brand.

And so Sourcenext started looking for a technology partner. Surprisingly, they turned to McAfee for help. And McAfee unreservedly recommended K7.

The computer became his favorite toy. A few years

later he would worry about

protecting it from alien

worms.

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At school, a nobody; here he was a hero, a center of attraction, and a whiz kid. 35 years later, the man reminisces, “I enjoyed the experience, and felt like a miracle had happened. In fact, I stopped talking with people as I stayed glued to program-ming.”

His parents worried if their son was a freak.

Their suspicions got confirmed when he refused to go back to school after the summer holidays. Pulikesi who would later have a remarkable influence on Keseven convinced him to join Class XI. The young boy went to school only to drop out later. “I gave it my best shot. It isn’t working. Education is im-portant, but the way of teaching must be different,” Keseven told his bewildered parents. Apparently, dad and mom did not find it amusing. But soon “I was starting to get recognized, was doing the odd bit of consulting, and earning more than what a rich dad’s son would get as pocket money.” It helped his par-ents understand the situation.

Keseven had mastered Basic, Cobol, and Fortran by the time he turned 17. The appetite whetted, he looked to Graphics programming for inspiration and soon began learning assem-bly level programming. Those two courses marked him out as a man to watch. In the late eighties, these were considered high-end work and only the techies, not school dropouts, ex-perimented with it. But Keseven was Silicon Valley material.

Soon Keseven started working with Ph.D. scholars. His job was to write programs for them for which he had to learn the basics of their subject. He wrote programs for civil engineers and learned a bit of Strength of Materials and Structural De-signs. He moved on to work for a chartered accountant and spent two years in understanding financial accounting to de-velop an accounting package! These association with different professionals turned out to be education at its best.

A date with virusThe first viruses attacked computers in the 1980s following the extensive use of personal computers. India also jumped on the bandwagon of home computers and viruses began to have a field day.

“When I saw viruses invade computers,” tells Keseven, “my first was to help people. The virus destroyed work, and it had no business to do so. So, I decided to get into anti-virus solu-tions, more as a challenge to bail out people facing virus at-tacks. I knew assembly language and DOS, and so it was easy for me to write codes to kill the virus. I did a lot of free ser-vices. In one sense, I accidentally created ‘freeware’ in India!”

The money would come years later.

Internationally, John McAfee and Peter Norton were big names in the anti-virus industry. The maverick British-Amer-ican programmer John McAfee founded the software compa-ny McAfee Associates, and the McAfee brand holds sway till date. The story of Peter Norton is interesting. One day in 1981, by mistake Norton deleted a file. Rather than re-enter the data,

Vaccines are preventive therapy. Earlier when a virus entered a system, we would move in to kill it. Today, we predict the behavior of attacks and build systems that will not let them in.

“We can stop the virus, but doing that will hurt the user experience. We can develop products that can kill cookies, but those advertisements have a value. After all, they are related ads, and no information of yours is stolen or sold. If a virus puts your information in the public domain, it’s an issue; otherwise, it’s fine. Spyware is a concern; adware is not.”

The malware landscape changed with time. In 1980, it was more a show of strength, to prove, “I can do.” Later, it moved to I can harm at a personal level. Today, it is about spying and stealing!

Victims don’t announce that they have been hacked. Which bank can go on record to say, “Our account got hacked”? It will only destroy customer confidence. Today, malware comes mostly from porn. Who has the guts to say he visited a porn site?

People steal credit card information and sell. That’s because they are scared of using it themselves. Today, fraudsters sell competition intelligence for big money.

The OS landscape has changed dramatically. In the 1980s and 90s, viruses came could only through an external device or media like floppy. Today, because of the Internet, they can come from anywhere, including embedded into a document or a photo.

There is a need to provide 360-degree protection.

Worming its way

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he wrote a program to recover the information from the disk. A year later in 1982, he founded Peter Norton Computing.

Keseven stood dumbstruck by the quality of the international anti-virus programs and told himself he would one day compete with these giants. In the eighties, if you were a techie, it was a badge of honor to go abroad for work. Ke-seven could have taken the flight, but a strong aroma of patriotism, made him stay back. Those days he worked with the Tamil Nadu Hospi-tal’s software company, Kody Computers. The promoter, Dr. Velusamy had a great vision but, sadly ran into rough weather.

In 1991, Keseven made the one call that would change his destiny. He chose to venture on his own. The decision to move from a hand-cuffed employee to an enterprising entrepreneur was a leap of faith.

First decadeDuring the first ten years of business (1991-2000), the first generation entrepreneur who had never been inside the sanctum sanctorum

of any college focused on the Indian market. The stretch was rugged and exciting.

In 1991, Keseven wrote his first antivirus program, VX 2000, arguably the world’s origi-nal DOS-based antivirus software. Impressed, USA’s Cyber-media, producers of top-selling products – PC911 and First-Aid for Windows – entered into a MoU with K7. Later McAfee took over Cyber-media. Keseven never patented any of his early products because he did not know anything about patents. It’s something he regrets till date. From VX 2000, there was no looking back as the company moved from strength to strength, acquiring clients and servicing cus-tomers.

Ask the anti-virus doctor why he is suc-cessful, and he spells out three reasons: Focus, Speed, and Quality.

For starters, the company was highly focused, to the extent of resembling a horse with blink-ers. It had information security for breakfast, information security for lunch, and informa-tion security for dinner. Products take time to mature, and you have to improve upon it con-tinuously. “Even in the best of ups and the worst of downs, we weren’t tempted to stray beyond

the PRODUCtS

then

& n

ow

1977Joins Sir M Venkatasubba Rao Senior Secondary School

1991Sets up K7 Computing

1968Kesavardhanan Jayaraman is born

1985-90Freelances

1998Sets K7 Anti-Virus Lab

1984Passes ICSE.

Enrols for a computer programming course

1992India’s first DOS based AV software

1985Gets a certificate in Computer programming

1996Develops generic decryption engine

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products to earn easy extra money.” There were gratuitous pieces of advice to move into consulting, but K7 wouldn’t budge. Nothing distracted their attention. Maybe, they did not know any thing else in life.

If the unadulterated focus on product was the first mantra, speed was the second. The team practiced it long before Gates paid hom-age to the word in his bestseller, Business @ the speed of thought. If a typical development took six months to do, his boys would finish it in 15 days. Someone half jocularly said, “They take more time than others. If the competition does it in half a year, these guys consume a full fortnight!” Remember speed was in the Founder’s DNA. It had all begun at the Computer Center where Keseven would finish programming in a fraction of the time allotted. For sure, there had been the rub off effect.

Keseven laid out outrageous goals because he believed they could be achieved. Even to-day, pushing 50, he can set the cat amongst the pigeons by writing codes along with other members and write it with speed. So no one could tell him, “Sir, this deadline cannot work,” for he would personally show them it worked. Yes, he walked the talk.

First ‘focus;’ next ‘speed;’ and finally ‘qual-ity.’ The unwritten rule was never to compro-mise customer quality at the altar of speed.

“All these came naturally to me. I had no formal education.”

Over the years, orders poured in as Kes-even gave his heart and soul to the products. His Office was everything for him and came ahead of Home in the scheme of priorities. Nothing much changed over the years. K7’s

2003Signs MoU with Sourcenext, Japan

2013Voted India's most trusted AV by NCRDC.

Product is VB100 certified

2008Sets up R&D center on OMR

2016Completes 25 years in business

1999McAfee makes an offer

2007State of art R&D facility at OMR

2010Recognized as No1 AV in Asia

201415 million customers

2017Sets up K7 Academy

20 million customers

Born Kesavardhanan Jayaraman

Known as Keseven

Date 13-07-68

Place Madras

Education ICSE

Alma mater Sir M Venkatasubba Rao Matriculation Higher Secondary School

Occupation Information System Security Solutions

Position Founder and CEO, K7 Computing

Flagship product K7 Total Security Solutions

Protects Users from viruses, malware and hacker attacks

Competitor B2B: Symantec, McAfee and Trend Micro

B2C: Kaspersky Lab and Quick Heal

Clients 20 million, worldwide

Types Home users, governments, and enterprises

Awards and

Certifications Multiple

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flagship offering, VX 2000, now rechristened K7 Total Security, continued to be the mainstay.

For Novel Netware, the most popular network-ing operating system of those times K7 were the leading security solution provider and had a large customer base for it. “We came out with security solutions both for Enterprise and for Consumers. Banks were big time users of our products.” But the focus moved from simple anti-virus solutions to a comprehensive security suite.

Eight years into the business, in 1999, K7 Computing received an offer from McAfee. The world leaders in anti-virus were willing to pay the Indian upstart 18 million USD. At an ex-change rate of Rs 42, it would have fetched the Indians 756 million INR or Rs 75 crore. It was an offer, to use the words of Don Corleone in the movie Godfather, “that’s impossible to re-sist.” Keseven flew to New York for discussions. His colleagues in India had their heart in their mouth. In the end, Keseven turned down the of-

fer. At an interest rate of 10%, the sum would be worth Rs 600 crore today. Given the present annual turnover, it would be 12 times purchase. A year earlier, Sabeer Bhatia sold Hotmail.com to Microsoft for $400 million. So does the whiz kid regret his decision?

“No, I don’t. In fact those days there was no Indian software product per-se, except Tally that made it big. I wanted to make an international product and was ready to bide my time.” We ask, “Is money unimportant? Will you sell to-day if the price is right?” He hedges. We wonder aloud, “what if the offer is a billion dollars?” He smiles and says, “show me where I should sign!” Clearly, he likes the whiff of money?

By 2001, the business was beginning to fall apart. Keseven explains it. “We faced a lot of challenges. We lacked marketing skills. We fo-cused on solutions for the latest virus. We did not understand the commercial aspects of busi-ness or taking products to bigger markets.”

those were the times...

With Nori Matsuda

Talent Pool

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Most of us are very passionate that a virus must be killed. It’s our Enemy Number 1.

We work with just 30 developers. Our competitors work with several times that number.

We made a lot of bad calls. We invested in marketing when we didn’t

haveasignificantpan-Indiapresence.Weblew money on TV ads. We hired senior professionals and it didn’t work out.

Mobile, IOT, and Online transactions are picking traction in India. Shortly

Smart-Phones will become the gateway for IT. At that time we will be at the epicenter of action.

The biggest threat is complacency. Technology is growing on a daily basis.

Security always has a future and will never get saturated.

The next two years will be exciting. It has taken us 25 years to reach here. We look to quantum growth.

Wordsworth

The company was growing exponentially and set up offices in various cities of India. But the growth turned out to be too hot to handle, and the company ran out of cash. In retrospect, the anti-virus doctor believes they should have set up franchises, instead of own offices. “We are technology guys. Salespeople in India have to be spoken to in the language salesmen understand. We lacked that skill set.

K7 needed a break.

Second comingIn the closing months of 2002 came the BREAKING NEWS which Keseven was hunting. Japanese software publisher Sourcenext was in search of a partner to de-velop a unified product, which could handle security issues relating to a firewall, anti-virus, and email; all rolled in one. They had just come out of a relation-ship with McAfee and asked them for a reference. The latter took only a couple of minutes to direct Source-next to K7 in India. And with that began a wonderful relationship with Nori Matsuda, founder and CEO of Sourcenext.

In early 2005, six-month-old Catherine Emi would doze the night on a beanbag in her father’s office room. The mop-haired code-writer, busy working furiously on a laptop, writing software to kill viruses, would slog till 1:30 a.m., when most of the civilized world would have long taken to bed. As if she were participating in a re-lay, Emi’s mother, along with a colleague, would over the next three hours do a quality check on Dad’s program-ming skills, before sending out a report to Tokyo, in Ja-pan. By the time the gang of three woke up, guys from the land of the rising sun would send in their feedback.

The partnership turned out to be a dream-come-true for Kesavardhanan Jayaraman.

He would now be competing with the McAfee and Nortons of the world. K7 and Sourcenext hit off well. The competitive advantage of the Japanese software distributor was: Customer first. “They understood consumer expectation, and this helped us in making a great product.” They added several global partner-ships, sold software products by the millions, and got listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Now, with a mar-ket share of 27%, Sourcenext is number one in Japan, ahead of McAfee and Symantec, and K7 is its hottest selling suite.

The first five years, spanning 2003 to 2008, were phe-nomenal. K7 worked with a small tight team, and the revenue per employee stood as tall as Rs 2 crore. Cash filled the granary. The new question was: What next? Keseven chose to go to the consumer market in India.

And there he courted disaster.

Actor Rajinikanth is my role model.

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Bombing in the marketIn 2008, a major financial crisis swept across the world taking in its wake long established entities like Lehman Brothers, AIG, etc.

In the same year, overwhelmed by the extraor-dinary run of success in Japan, Keseven decided to shift his focus to India. The Indian market was growing, thanks to IT & ITES. There were no technology gaps between India and USA and it made sense to focus on India.

“We opened a 25,000-sqft office in the rapidly growing IT Corridor, staffed it with 100 people and injected senior professionals.” The place reeked of money. “I am a developer, and I like my fellow developers to feel like kings. We cre-ated a young, modern, homely, and spacious en-vironment, for I believed people are assets, not an expense.” About 250-sqft of space for each employee. Wow!

The company thought it could storm the mar-ket. As it happened, the Indian space which Keseven had nurtured till 2002, and abandoned following the opportunity in Tokyo, wasn’t easy meat. It didn’t turn to be a walk in the park.

“Maybe I didn’t speak the right language. May-be the professionals were not comfortable work-ing with a school drop out. Also, in India buy-ers preferred piracy to new products so as to cut on costs. Hardware hadn’t moved up the value chain. Worse still, the country didn’t have a good distribution system for software products. While we tied up with a few software distributors, they worked more like a warehouse partner, than a marketing partner. If you close a sale, they will supply the product. They wouldn’t proactively make a deal. I kept funding. Japan went through a harrowing time. I borrowed and spent.”

Little wonder from 2007 onwards, revenues stayed flat at Rs 25 crore for five full years. It was time to change strategy, and that is what Ke-seven did.

“If we had to win, we needed to work like an FMCG company. So, we established a chan-nel network, treated our anti-virus solution as a consumer product, and decided to sell it like how Colgate sold ‘toothpaste.’ We created a 120-strong sales force. We got the FMCG guys who worked in Asian Paints, Castrol, Colgate, and Nestle for this. We mapped the 15,000 out-

team K7

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lets. Our salesmen met and spoke to people at every store.” The results were instantaneous. K7’s India revenue rose from Rs 8 crore to Rs 40 crore within a year.

K7 Computing was back in business, and with a vengeance.

The philosopher’s AcademyKeseven drives a BMW car but is equally com-fortable taking the public transport.

Ask him about his happiest moment, and he turns philosophical. “Nothing excites me. You should to sustain whatever you acquire. There is no point winning the 42-km marathon race, and dropping down dead. When we win Awards and Certificates, people come to me telling how happy an occasion it is. While I respect their views, my adrenalin doesn’t flow. If we do our jobs particularly well these are bound to happen. The underlying philosophy is to set high targets and sustain them. It’s not enough to crack it one month; you need to break it month after month.”

When asked about the tenacity to overcome ad-versities, he says, “Everyone faces crises in life. The

point at which he gives up decides his destiny.” He tells the interesting story of his dalliance with debt with co-director Sudhir Kaul. When Keseven was looking for angel funding, someone referred him to the Singapore based Indian. Kaul didn’t like handing out soft loans and wanted to charge at market rates. Keseven had no choice other than to accept. Before the contract could be inked the finances in K7 took a giant leap upwards, and the company was in a position to refuse the borrow-ing. However, having liked Kaul’s unrelenting ap-proach, he invited him as a co-director.

Today Kesavardhanan is a firm believer in Je-sus Christ. He says spirituality and business eth-ics cannot be separated. He reads a lot of Godly books and says when in challenging times he feeds off his spiritual beliefs. A chance meeting with Srini Raju, the former CEO of D&B Satyam Software opened Keseven’s eyes. While Keseven looked for money, Raju gave him Gyan. On a drive to the Chennai Airport, the private equity inves-tor asked, “How do you replicate at least five Kes-evens?” It set the nerd to think about scale.

K7 Computing now has much more than five. But Keseven wants to replicate many more; not

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just to adorn his Company, but to venture out and become entrepreneurs. To accomplish that vision, he is shifting gears to launch the K7 Academy. In the first year, it will offer a 12-month certification program in Cyber Se-curity. It will teach students the fundamentals of programming in the way Keseven learned it 30 years ago and fine-tuned it over time. Students would also receive practical experi-ence at K7 Computing. At course completion,

Keseven believes they will be first class developers who can be absorbed by any company. In the second year, a 24-month program will come up where stu-dents who have passed class XII would join in. He expects that at the end of the course, they would be far better than the engineer programmer. The batch strength will be 25.

At the end of the course, Kesevan believes that they will be first class developers who can not only be absorbed by top companies but can also set out as entrepreneurs.

Can Keseven succeed in this institute-industry interface model?

Exciting times aheadIn 2016, forty employees boarded the Air India flight to Singapore. Some of them were flying fo the first time, and some had applied for their pass-port only then. Everyone stayed in the same type of accommodation and did sight seeing and shopping together in the tourist happy Singapore. The men and women came from different levels of hierarchy but had one thing in common. They had been part of the K7 family for more than five years. Accom-panying them on their visit to commemorate their brilliant performance during the challenging year 2015 were Kesavardhanan Jayaraman and his wife, Sheba Grace. The team members could have re-ceived a rich cash award, but they would probably have put it aside for future use instead of investing it in a once in a lifetime experience. Obviously, the company picked the tab.

In the autumn of 2018, Kesavardhanan will turn 50. He believes if given a choice, he would relive his business life the exact way he lived it. Doing. Experi-menting. Striving. Losing. Re-experimenting. Perse-vering. Winning. Again, losing. He looks forward to a five-fold growth in revenue in the next three years and a three-fold rise in the subsequent five years. For it to happen, you need more than just a visionary leader, more than a 15,000 square feet office, and more than a 120 team-force. You need research that would generate new products, you need nimbleness, you require soft assets, you have to assemble a top class leadership at national prices, and above all, you need to continue to believe in your destiny.

Kesavardhanan Jayaraman says he is willing to do them all, and much more. “When we can lead in other markets, why not reign in our own country?” he asks bombastically.

India is a Rs 3000 crore market afterall. m

CeRtiFiCatiOnSMost certified and awarded anti-virus software. A true show of relentless efforts.

AV-TEST CERTIFICATION

TUV CERTIFICATION

MICROSOFT GOLD CERTIFIED

PARTNER

CHECKMARK PLATINUM

CERTIFICATION

AV-COMP ADVANCE+ AWARD 2010

AV-COMPARATIVES AWARD

AV-COMP ADVANCE+ AWARD 2011

Text: V Pattabhi Ram | Editorial Team: Anuradha Ramani, J Evenjeline | Design: N Malaiselvan, Prime Academy