In 1905, two Parsi brothers Pesi and Rustom Patel came to Mumbai (then Bombay) to make their fortune. They founded Patel Brothers to trade in cotton and soon became the largest and most successful cotton merchants in India.

In the 1960s the firm diversified into the manufacture of agricultural machinery, and industrial safety and environmental products in collaboration with the world’s leading manufacturers in those industries.

In 1984, Cyrus Patel in partnership with Viraf Sutaria established a microfilm service bureau - Patel MicroData, which later transformed into a microfilm scanning unit, the subject of this website.

In 1995, Cyrus and Viraf  along with two other partners also founded Automated Workflow (AWPL). Today AWPL is a large and very successful Business Process Management (BPM) and  Enterprise Content Management (ECM) organization. AWPL is IBM’s predominant BPM & ECM partner in Asia with 150 + employees and 100 + projects implemented worldwide, mainly in the insurance domain.