The Brevard Technical Journal

Controlling Destiny
A boyhood ambition to be his own boss has led Anjan Ghosal to the top of Intellinet Technologies

By Anne Straub
Brevard Technical Journal

By all measures, Anjan Ghosal's first entrepreneurial experience was a success. His venture quickly turned a profit, albeit a small one, and grew to include seven additional outlets. Prospects appeared positive until he ran into a regulatory roadblock: his dad.

Anjan Ghosal was named Technology Products Entrepreneur of the Year for Florida by Ernst & Young this year. Photo by Tim Shortt, © 2002.

The venture was a library, and Ghosal was 12 years old. The public libraries in his hometown outside of Calcutta, India, didn't carry the comic books that were popular with kids. So Ghosal formulated a business plan: Children who lent him 25 books would have a free membership to his library. Those who didn't have such capital investment would pay to borrow books.

By the time his collection grew to 300 volumes, he ran into delivery problems. Ghosal didn't have a bicycle, so he adopted the school bus as his distribution system. He chose kids who attended his school but lived in different outlying areas and appointed them branch managers. Ghosal would take the books to school on the bus and distribute them to his deputies, who then would recruit members and manage a branch from their own homes.

Ghosal found out later that business practice was called franchising.

The growth outlook was favorable until his grades started slipping. "Dad put an end to it," Ghosal recalled. He was told to study now, and save the library for later in life.

Instead, Ghosal's chosen business is telecommunications software. But the fact that he is running his business is no surprise. "I always had that streak in me that I wanted to be my own boss and control my own destiny," Ghosal said.

Ghosal serves as president and chief executive of IntelliNet Technologies in Melbourne, a company he started in 1992. IntelliNet specializes in software that telecommunications companies can integrate into their platforms to save development time and manpower.

The company started primarily as a professional services firm helping carriers in the field of intelligent networks, such as toll-free numbers and prepaid calling cards. It landed work for a Tampa wireless company during that industry's boom and did the switching and network management for wireless equipment maker AirNet, which spun off from Harris Corp. in 1994.

By then, the company employed five people. Providing professional services had allowed Ghosal to start the company with no outside financing, but it failed to provide recurring revenue. The team picked up valuable skills with each job, but each new contract felt like starting over.

With his eye toward eventually attracting outside investment, Ghosal switched business models in 1997 to focus on marketing a product. Today, the company has grown to 50 employees and markets two software packages.

That leadership led to Ghosal being named Technology Products Entrepreneur of the Year for Florida by Ernst & Young this year.

"We were very impressed by what Anjan was able to create on his own, in a bootstrap fashion," said John Hill, managing director of Hyde Park Capital Partners, a technology-focused investment banking firm in Tampa. "He has built a very sophisticated, growing, credible software company. In the past few years, despite a difficult telecom environment, he has done well."

Hill's firm has been working with IntelliNet to find growth capital for the business, which expects to make some acquisitions soon. He sees potential in the company's software being used by companies looking for the next killer wireless application. Whether that is mobile video, remote location services, or another technology, companies developing that application would provide a market for IntelliNet's software.

"IntelliNet has the software that companies will need to develop those applications," said Hill, who nominated Ghosal for the Ernst & Young award. "We think IntelliNet is positioned for growth for when the telecommunications market turns around."

Ghosal's feel is that time is near. "Things are stabilizing," he said, describing his outlook for the telecommunications industry as cautiously optimistic. "We've hit some kind of bottom. The pipeline is starting to fill up."

The company's Accelero application development software offers companies a building block that accelerates their time to market and reduces the engineers needed to ready a system. Included in the software are capabilities that help companies develop leading-edge applications, such as wireless location services. The ability to pinpoint the location of a wireless subscriber has important implications for emergency services, but introduces marketing opportunities as well.

For example, a carrier could send a subscriber a discount at a restaurant she's passing if she stops in during the next 30 minutes. Or, a user could request that he be notified if someone on his buddy list (who has granted permission for the request) happens to be nearby, say at another store in the same mall. The technology could even be applied to the dating game to notify a subscriber if someone who has filled out a profile that matches the subscriber's requirements is nearby.

IntelliNet also markets Convero, a software-based signaling gateway that connects disparate networks.

The company posted $5.6 million in sales last year and expects to land in the same range this year. The figure could triple by next year, as the company expects to make some acquisitions. "There are a lot of companies that were richly valued a few years ago that are going for a song," Ghosal said.

Ghosal holds a bachelor's in chemical engineering from Indian Institute of Technology. He came to the United States on a scholarship in 1985 to pursue a master's in computer science at West Virginia University. He then worked for several companies, including BellCore in New Jersey. He calls the telecommunications giant a good place to be from but not a good place to be: The predictable lifestyle of the longtime corporate employee was not for him. "What I did was learn as much as I could," he said.

The career path suits him. Though his parents' interests in science and technology rubbed off on him, their caution didn't. His father is an electrical engineer and his mother, a schoolteacher, holds a master's in biology. Ghosal remembers his father in particular wanting to make sure he considered the risks in his venture. "I've always been fairly independent," he said. Chemical engineering would have been very stable, but that's the problem. "You don't make new discoveries every day. Here, you have a chance to make a big difference."

Ghosal and his wife, Reena, have two sons: Sunil, 4, and Saurav, 3.

On the web: www.intellinet-tech.com.