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: of Anil Batra’s secretary. The supplier felt they had a chance if Neeraj could make an impression on Batra. Neeraj geared up to represent Ace and its suppliers but was up against a formidable list of organisations, including Hewlett-Packard (HP), Wipro, IBM, vying to be Cisco’s vendor.

As destiny would have it, Cisco representatives were impressed with Neeraj’s “simplicity, approach and attitude” and Cisco went on to use Ace as its medium to source computers and peripherals from HP and its suppliers and vendors. This put Ace in a bigger league.

Things were going smoothly for Ace with both Cisco and HP till 1999-2000, when HP merged with Compaq. Bidding started again and this time Wipro, Dell and the other big boys sidelined Ace.

Subin Joseph, who then headed the PCs and servers unit at HP and was a mentor to Neeraj, suggested a move over to the storage space, a specialised domain requiring technical skills. Neeraj jumped at the idea. The opportunity was ripe as the storage solution segment was budding and opportunities abounded, including in training.

The leap of faith proved positive. In 2003, Ace phased out the peripherals business and submerged itself into storage solutions. The brothers realised quickly that partnerships were needed to give clients a full range of storage solutions. EMC was an initial partner and later Iron Mountain—which provides desktop back-up—and Network Appliances became partners.

Today, Ace is the sole authorised service provider for EMC back-up software. Mediratta points out that EMC’s core strength was making storage hardware and it acquired about 40 companies to build its capability in storage software such as recovery, information protection, security and information record management.

Ace’s clients now include Bharti, Dabur, Hughes Software Systems (rechristened Erscent) and Hero Honda. Neeraj says Ace’s USP has been its ability to understand the client’s need and recommend and implement specialised solutions. Neeraj remembers the long wait to win Dabur’s confidence. Finally, it won the trust when it cleaned up a mess left by a multinational major. Ace met Dabur’s tough standards.

And then, when a rival storage company poached their entire workforce of 15 people, Ace had to rebuild its work-force quickly.