THERE cannot be many entrepreneurs who have chosen to name their company after
a computer error. 1E is the blue screen that is displayed on your computer
when it has crashed, and as someone whose self-appointed mission was to stop
this happening to large companies it appealed to Sumir Karayi.
“We wanted a short name because the dotcom boom was starting to happen and 1E
was our favourite way that Windows crashed,” he said.
Karayi grew up in the Indian city of Mussoorie with his two sisters and he
spent his early years going for long walks in the mountains with his dog. At
the age of 14, however, the family moved to Britain when his father, a
diplomat, was posted here.
Karayi was sent to a school near their new home in Becken-ham, Kent. It was
not a happy time. “It was one of the worst 17 schools in the country and I
found it really hard. I came across pretty strong racism and since the
school was fairly dys-functional anyway, I tried to avoid it as much as I
could.”
He managed to pass enough exams, though, to get a place at Warwick University
to study engineering and when his parents and sisters returned to India
after three years, he stayed on. He was sponsored through his degree by a
telecoms company, STC, and while working for the firm during the summer
holidays as part of their research team realised he had found something he
loved doing.
He stayed on at Warwick to do a second degree, in information technology for
manufacturing, and on graduating married a girl he had met in his first year
at university and got a job with a computing firm in Oxford. He spent the
next few years moving jobs every 18 months or so, writing computer software
as he worked his way up the industry until in 1997, at the age of 27, he
became a technical expert at Microsoft.
He loved it, but after 18 months decided to start up a company of his own that
specialised in managing Windows software for large companies and helping
them run their PCs. He persuaded two colleagues from Microsoft to join him
and the three put in £500 each to start up the business from the spare room
of Karayi’s flat in Ealing, west London.
Initially, however, it was a business with a difference. “The idea was that
we’d be a commune of the top technical experts in our field and that
everyone in the company was equal,” he said.
To start with, the commune thrived. Microsoft became their biggest customer
and through the firm they obtained work with big companies like NatWest and
Barclays. Karayi said: “We had no idea how to sell and no idea how to run
ourselves but we knew what we were doing technically and we were very good
at what we were selling.”
After eight months, however, the work dried up and lacking any kind of
business experience, they had no idea how to fix the problem. So they sought
help from Business Link and also asked a professional nonexecutive for
advice. The first thing he told them was to ditch the commune idea and elect
a leader. They chose Karayi.
The second thing he said was that one of them had to go on a sales training
course. Karayi offered to go.
Karayi said: “He was frightfully expensive but gave us some of the best advice
I’ve ever had in my life. In two to three sessions he got us to realign
ourselves completely. We knew what we wanted to do but none of us had a clue
how to run a business.”
Two months later the newly structured team won a big contract with NPI, the
insurer, and soon after that struck a big deal with Colt Telecom. Then in
1999 Karayi and his team wrote the software program that would transform the
fortunes of the business.
At the time large corporations faced a big problem: if their IT department
wanted to send security updates to all the computers on people’s desks in
the organisation, all those computers had to be left on all night – at a
huge cost in electricity.
Karayi wrote a program that enabled an organisation to turn on remotely all
the computers when it needed to – and then remotely turn them all off again
when it did not. He calculated that for one particular bank, being able to
turn off all the 36,000 computers within the business meant it could save
$4m (£2m) a year in running costs. He called the program Nightwatchman.
He said: “The problem we were trying to address was fairly complex because
someone might have left a document open and not saved it before going home.
If an administrator turned off that machine, the data would be lost. So we
wrote a bit of software that checks whether a computer is being used or not
and that will save any data that might be open. We saw a huge saving in
terms of energy costs as well as a saving in being able to keep machines up
to dFirm was programmed to succeed ate.”
In fact, he worked out that the savings amounted to half a tonne of carbon
dioxide in emissions per computer per year.
Karayi bought out one of his colleagues in 2000 and the other in 2002. “It was
the right thing to do,” he said. “I realised that as an entrepreneur I was
the main driving force of the business and I needed to run things my way.”
Thanks in part to Nightwatchman, which is now in its fourth version, turnover
of 1E is expected to be £15m this year and, as in previous years, the
company is set to make a 30% net profit.
Now aged 37 and married with one child, Karayi said the secret of his success
– and that of the business – had been focus. He said: “We have an
uncompromising attitude towards work at 1E. Everyone has a sense of
belonging and we are pretty ruthless on ourselves in terms of quality. We
are incredibly focused, we only do one thing and we have only done one thing
from the beginning, which is Windows deployment management for large
companies. And we have just exploited that niche.”
His advice to others is this: “Don’t start a business unless you are 100% sure
that it is the only thing you want to do.”
