Customer centricity has been a guiding principle for Microland, a digital infrastructure solutions company, for many decades. Pradeep Kar, the company’s founder, noted its choice to remain focused rather than diversify into a broad range of services has contributed to achieving industry-leading customer satisfaction levels as Microland recently celebrated 35 years in business.

“All we do is infrastructure. That’s our DNA. And we’ve consciously taken a call we won’t diversify to be a broad-based player because we have to differentiate ourselves in this space. Our entire company understands this and therefore customers come to us because we know this space as well as anyone else,” Pradeep Kar, Founder, chairman, and managing director of Microland Limited said, adding that the company’s customer retention is over 90%.

The Bengaluru-headquartered company has a team of over 4,600 employees worldwide and delivers services to over 100 countries across Asia, Australia, Europe, the Middle East, and North America, offering solutions in networks, cloud, data centers, cybersecurity, services management, applications, and automation.

“Over 80% of our business comes from overseas and around 12% is from APAC. From a facility standpoint, we have two in Bangalore and the US, one in Pune, the UK, and the Middle East,” Kar said.

Sam Mathew, the president of Microland said the company will continue to invest in its innovation-based R&D, which AI is built into. “We have a reasonably good global presence today and operate in over 100 countries globally. We will be going deeper into those countries and expanding our global presence a bit more. That’s a clear direction for the future because some markets have to be tapped.”

He added that India will continue to be an important region for Microland mainly because it has reached the maturity it deserves for the digital economy, and has the ethos needed to drive its business for the future. Kar noted that as India becomes a larger economy, the need for high-quality services increases, as customers will want the same services as international companies.

Some of Microland’s large customers include yesteryear’s Fortune 5 and Fortune 10 companies that have been with them for the last 25 years, Mathew said.

Clifford Chance, a British multinational law firm, and Serco AsPac, a division of the Serco Group and one of the world’s largest public service providers, are among the company’s key clients. Additionally, it serves a major tire manufacturing company and a leading aerospace firm. In India, Maruti Suzuki is a large customer for whom the company manages its infrastructure.

While manufacturing is a strong sector for the company, it is also seeing growth in emerging financial and business services, as well as in healthcare.

“A large airline company in Ireland with over 100 aircraft is mostly into cargo. Often, while leasing the airlines, it takes around four months to document all the flying hours, maintenance, etc. With AI, we managed to cut this time by half,” Kar said, expressing his optimism about the technology.

AI-powered operations

The company’s Intelligeni platform is an AIOps platform for Automated Operations. In 2023, it also established an AI Centre of Excellence (COE) in Bengaluru.

“Every customer in the world is exploring and reflecting on the impacts of AI on India’s businesses. At the same time, they are cautious about two areas - how much internal IP may get exposed to a public platform and two, the cost of AI because subscribing to specific AI platforms can get expensive,” he stated.

Kar also added that at various phases in the future, AI will be significant. However, this will happen gradually over the next 5-10 years.

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