Rajiv Rohmetra and the company that outgrew its name

Two people make a very small company. There is nowhere to hide, and probably nobody to whom one can forward an awkward email. When Rajiv Rohmetra looked back on TA Digital at his retirement in November 2023, that was the starting number he chose to remember. He had co-founded the business in 2000 with Koti Reddy. More than two decades later, he was handing over a consultancy that had joined Omnicom and worked with clients around the world.

The distance between those moments is the interesting part. Rohmetra’s career at TA Digital spans several changes in what businesses expected from technology: publishing information online, connecting customer systems, selling across channels, and using data to make those encounters more useful. His company kept adding capabilities as the assignment grew. Eventually, even the name needed more room.

There is a second question tucked inside that growth story. Once a company becomes large enough to continue without its founder at the controls, what should the founder do? Rohmetra’s answer arrived in stages: a new owner, a broader leadership role for his eventual successor, and then a departure. His present work in investment adds another chapter to a career spent building.

A business built between the systems

The company began as TechAspect. Its work occupied the space between a business’s ambitions and the software expected to deliver them. A content management system might publish a page; a customer relationship system might hold the customer record; analytics might measure a visit. Making the pieces cooperate was an assignment in its own right. Under Rohmetra, TechAspect developed a business around those connections.

A Paychex project offers a useful view of that work. TechAspect consolidated publishing processes using Autonomy TeamSite, standardized page layouts and implemented more than 50 components. Publishing could be completed in minutes. Reusable components accounted for 90 percent of new microsites and language sites in the project. It is an unglamorous sort of achievement until you imagine being the person waiting for a page to go live.

The pleasure here is practical. Once a component can be reused, the next site need not begin with a blank sheet. Once a publishing process is simpler, somebody can spend less time navigating it. This is the everyday territory of the business Rohmetra helped build: work that becomes visible to a customer precisely when it stops being troublesome.

Adding people before adding a new name

By June 2014, TechAspect was expanding its marketing automation practice. Kimberly Prescott came in to lead it, and Deborah Gibbs joined as director of demand generation. The offering included implementation, optimization, enterprise integration and training. That last item deserves its place. Software still has to meet the people expected to use it, usually on a Monday morning with other work waiting.

For Rohmetra, the expansion brought web content management into closer contact with marketing automation, customer records, enterprise systems and commerce. The customer experience could stretch across all of them. Building that breadth meant bringing in people with different specialties and allowing the business to take on a wider brief.

Partnerships developed alongside the hiring. In March 2017, TechAspect announced Business Partner status in Adobe’s Solution Partner Program. Rohmetra described an Adobe relationship already approaching a decade. The chronology matters: this was accumulated platform experience, with a new designation marking a relationship that had been developing for years. A partnership badge takes only a little space on a website. The work behind it takes considerably longer.

Keeping two letters, changing the brief

On September 25, 2018, TechAspect became TA Digital. The decision had a specific logic. Brand research favored evolving the existing identity because the old name carried value, while the business had grown beyond what that name conveyed. The company kept a connection to its past and gave its broader services a more suitable introduction.

“We also wanted to attract opportunities to market the organization,” Rohmetra said at the time. He connected the change to future expansion, including artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things. The company’s new tagline was “Intelligent Transformation.” Behind the language sat an operational question familiar to an expanding business: how do you introduce what you now do without making everyone forget what they already know about you?

Reddy, then chief operating officer, and Ali Alkhafaji, then chief technology officer, were part of that announcement too. Their presence makes the change more interesting than a founder unveiling fresh stationery. The same leadership names recur through the company’s next stages. Rohmetra’s story is full of other people carrying substantial parts of the enterprise.

When a services business shipped a product

In February 2021, TA Digital launched SearchBoost.ai, its first software as a service product. The idea addressed a familiar frustration: a search box can return results and still fail to return something useful to the person doing the searching. SearchBoost.ai used behavior data and machine learning to personalize and reorder results.

Its proposed place was within an existing technology setup. It connected to a data source and search engine, used the information to train a model, and returned improved results to the search system. At launch, connectors included Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics, Apache Solr, Elasticsearch and Adobe Experience Manager. The product’s design reflected a company accustomed to working among systems already in use.

Rohmetra tied the launch to years of listening to customers and solving their problems. For a consultancy, a product creates a different kind of deliverable: a defined offering that can be used across customer settings. SearchBoost.ai gave TA Digital a concrete example of that move. The search box was small; the business decision behind it was rather larger.

That August, the company announced its sixth appearance on the Inc. 5000, ranking No. 2,854. The recognized years were 2013, 2014, 2015, 2019, 2020 and 2021. They form two runs of three, a reminder that the company had more than one period of growth under Rohmetra. By then, its work extended across strategy, experience, data, marketing, commerce and managed services.

The acquisition with a second act

Omnicom announced its acquisition of TA Digital on March 2, 2022. The fit was specific: customer experience, content management and commerce capabilities, supported by relationships with platforms including Adobe, Acquia, SAP and Sitecore. TA Digital joined Omnicom Precision Marketing Group, with its services closely aligned with Credera.

At the time, the management team led by Rohmetra, Reddy and Alkhafaji was to continue leading the company. A sale therefore preceded the founder’s exit. Rohmetra’s stated ambition remained expansion of the company’s strategy, customer experience, marketing and cloud work for clients globally. The acquisition changed the setting in which that work would continue.

In September 2022, Rohmetra visited the India offices to discuss the Omnicom association and the company’s future. The visit also made room for colleagues to get together. The photographs show desks, presentations and groups gathered for a picture. After the acquisition language, those images restore the scale at which a company is experienced: a roomful of people listening, asking questions and returning to their work.

Making room for the next signature

On October 31, 2022, Alkhafaji was promoted to president while remaining chief technology officer. His remit included clients, sales, marketing, delivery, alliances and consulting. TA Digital then described a workforce of more than 1,000 across North America and India. Rohmetra was still CEO, with a president taking responsibility across much of the operating business.

Alkhafaji had joined in 2017. His promotion placed someone with years inside the company in a role spanning its commercial and delivery functions. It gave the later succession a visible preceding step. The timeline shows a widening of responsibility before the change at the top, although it does not establish when Rohmetra decided to retire.

The handover became official on November 6, 2023. Rohmetra retired, and Alkhafaji became CEO and president. “I am honored and grateful for the privilege of leading TA Digital for over two decades,” Rohmetra said. His successor’s tribute included a more personal word: “friendship.” After years of shared work, both the business relationship and the human one had a place in the farewell.

“I love creating and scaling businesses.”

Rajiv Rohmetra, LinkedIn profile

Another place to build

Today, Kalter Capital lists Rohmetra as a managing partner alongside Reddy. The firm focuses on direct real estate investment, including residential, mixed use and hospitality properties. His LinkedIn profile also lists Novar Capital. The familiar partnership with Reddy has continued into another area of business.

That move gives his retirement a precise meaning: he left the CEO role at TA Digital. The interest in creating and scaling businesses remains in his own description of himself. After more than twenty years helping companies connect their technology, he is working in a different investment setting, with a longstanding colleague still alongside him. The company he co-founded has its next leadership chapter. So does he.