While consulting giants like Accenture, TCS, and Infosys cater to million dollar needs of large companies, where do these large companies and small and medium-sized businesses go when they need small-scale but specific solutions? Noida-based startup, Aurelius Corporate Solutions, an insourcing multiplier solutions company offers consultative learning solutions across forty plus domains and caters to more than 500 technologies in around 30 countries.
The company develops and customises training programmes focusing on the application side of technology. These programs are delivered in real time through virtual cloud-hosted labs based on the diverse requirements of companies.
Sumit Peer, founder and CEO of Aurelius, spoke to The Tech Panda about the business model of Aurelius and its future vision.
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An MBA from the US, Peer has worked in India for 13 years before launching Aurelius in 2009, his forte being high-end technology, sales, and catering to international clients. During his career, Peer says, he discovered that every customer knew what they wanted, but the challenge was that they could not always afford to go to SAP or Oracle to upgrade their business.
“Let’s say I am a company and I am facing a techno-functional issue, but I don’t have a million USD to upgrade my equipment,” Peer explains. He realised that there was a gap here. “Why not start a company to cater to that need. We started addressing those particular needs. Customers approach us saying that we have twenty- or thirty-thousand dollars. Can you fix this problem? We understand their problem, which might be functional or techno-functional,” he adds.
Sumit Peer, CEO
Headquartered in Noida, Aurelius has branch offices in Bengaluru and Pune. With more than hundred faculty planned all over the world, Aurelius SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) work with their customer to find an engineered solution. Aurelius has delivered more than 1000 unique technologies so far. Moreover, after they come up with the solution, instead of implementing it, they train the customer on how to implement it.
“At the end of the day, the customer’s own people are enabled to handle the problem. They don’t have to outsource their work,” Peer says.
Aurelius provides solutions for problems with Level-3 difficulty and above. Hence, the solutions have to be customised. Peer explains that, while anybody can train and apply from programmes like Java and Dot net, L3 issues require higher technical intricacies.
“These are the problems for which you cannot find any courseware or training to solve. So customers can either go to a TCS, or they can come to us,” he says.
Peer founded the company along with his wife, Meghna, who handles sales for the company. A self-funded company, Aurelius is growing. “In the last year, we have doubled our sales. We are going at a good rate, and we are not losing money,” the 41-year-old CEO says proudly.
The USP of Aurelius lies in its insourcing multiplier model vis-à-vis its global competitors. The company finds out the challenges a customer is facing across departments, be it human resources, RnD, supply chain management, sales, or techno functional. While providing solutions, they do not restrict themselves to the IT domain only
“Currently, we operate in 40 domains, and we are still expanding. When customers work with us, we provide multiplied insourcing across the organisation and sometimes even to their sister companies,” Peer says.
Aurelius, which is an ISO 9001 company, counts among its clients not only big names but also diverse ones. Some of them include the American farm equipment giant John Deere, Barclays, Tech Mahindra, Accenture, Hubble Space Telescope, LNT, and TCS.
“These are insourcing solutions. Our customers are diverse such as TCS, John Deere, Indian Army, the Canadian government, IMF, and World Bank. When these kind of customers work with technology, they have different kinds of problems. They need specific solutions. Our solutions are given online in real time. After the programme, the customer will go and exactly solve that problem on their own,” Peer says.
The CEO explains that many of Aurelius’ customers are GICs (Global Insourcing Centres). Giving an example of their working model, he says that if the John Deere GIC, which is situated in India, has any issues across their product line, it will look to Aurelius.
“Most of the time, we are helping customers fulfill their own needs and the needs of their own customers,” he says.
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Peer says that Aurelius’ disruption value is big, while they are also inexpensive, which is required in a world moving towards insourcing. He says there is a lot of market opportunity in India for knowledge solutions integration. Companies cannot keep buying new equipment every time new technology comes along, because the next new technology’s arrival will throw the old one out.
“The key is that we enable their own people to solve the requirement. Neither do we send 20 people to carry out the work, nor do we ask to outsource their work. We define a curriculum, so that their own people will be able to solve the problem,” he says.
For the future, Aurelius wants to go global. “Currently, a lot of our business is based out of India. We want to be a one-stop shop for all insourcing needs. We want to take the business global, because in the world, there are several SMBs, which cannot afford to build their GICs. We want to be available for such companies, wherever they may be in the world.”
