With happy employees who are close to their hometown: Vijendra Chauhan, CEO, Evon Technologies, Dehradun
What made Vijendra Chauhan, CEO, Evon Technologies Pvt Ltd, Dehradun, switch from a cushy corporate job to starting his own business, in his hometown Dehradun? The decision to move back to Dehradun was really difficult, he says. “But the priority was clearly set and, therefore, I took the plunge. I had always wanted to do something of my own in my hometown for two specific reasons: To stay close to my family, and to tap the local potential that migrated to places like NCR.”
Evon is a 125-people organisation that serves in the area of web and mobile applications development. Clients are spread across the globe, with major concentration in the US.
Dehradun is a great place to settle in, observes Vijendra. “Setting up the business here in the IT industry was however a challenging task in the beginning. Getting good software engineers in the initial stages was not an easy task. However, with many engineering colleges in and around Dehradun, we could handpick talented freshers. We groomed these freshers and scaled the company in the initial phase. Later, we targeted experienced people from places like NCR, Bangalore, and Chandigarh, who had roots in Uttarakhand. The objective was to reverse the migration trend and build a company of happy employees who are close to their hometown. This really helped, as we never faced the problem of attrition, and were able to provide stable teams to our clients. Also, by virtue of being in Uttarakhand, there were tax rebates provided by the government and we could manage to be very competitive in our pricings. The quality of living in Dehradun is far better than in the metro cities, and commuting times are hardly of concern to anyone. The climate of Dehradun is awesome. All this culminates in a happy workforce at Evon.”
As for the disadvantage, Vijendra concedes that Dehradun is still not on the IT map of the country. This fact sometimes is deterrent for prospective clients and it sometimes becomes difficult to convince them, he notes. “Also, one would not easily get plug-and-play offices in Dehradun; and so, to scale immediately, it is difficult. However, Evon has its own infrastructure of around 250-people capacity coming up in the IT park of Dehradun to address this issue.”
Where does he see majority of Evon’s growth coming from? From the US, says Vijendra. “There has been good traction from Australia and South Africa in the recent past, though. Technologically, on the web front, there is a lot of growth in Ruby on Rails (RoR). On the mobile side, both Android and iPhone apps are in equal demand.”
About
Vijendra graduated from IIT Delhi as a Computer Science Engineer in 1996. He then worked with Smartnet, a startup company in Delhi for a few years. He then did his M.Tech. in computer Science form JNU. In 2000, he started an IT services company, Hexys Technologies, in Delhi, along with a few of his batch-mates. He was the CTO of the company for three years. The company, however, had to be dissolved in 2003. He then worked as a consultant for companies such as ICICI, Fractal Analytics, and Momentum India (later acquired by Sopra), after which he decided to return to his hometown Dehradun. In Dehradun, he served as an Assistant Professor in one of the esteemed institutions for some time, and finally in 2006 he co-founded Evon Technologies.
- Guest Author: Vijay Seshadri
