Source: economictimes.indiatimes.com

The California-based Symphony Services, a global provider of product engineering outsourcing services, will broaden its base in the city from 1,000 employees to 10,000.

The president and CEO of Symphony, Gorden Brooks, said at a press interaction Friday: “Pune is very innovative. We like the work culture here.”

The reason Brooks called Pune innovative is because of the 250 new ideas that the company developed in 2007, 20 percent came from its facility in Pune. Also, of the 18 patents filed by the company for its clients in 2007, nine came from Pune.

Symphony Services is into the niche business of product engineering outsourcing services to independent software vendors (ISVs), software enabled businesses and embedded companies in automotive, networking, telecom and consumer electronics market. This the company does through its development centres in various parts of the world.

Symphony has close to 3,900 employees in India. It also has development centres in Bangalore, Mumbai and Hyderabad. All the centres account for 95 percent of Symphony’s delivery capabilities.

The company, formed in 2002, achieved the $100 million revenue milestone in 2006. It has a growth rate of 48 percent per annum.

The company has established a development centre in China, which is not as big as India. Brooks said: “India is way ahead, at least eight years ahead of China in domain skills.”

, he was quick to point out that India too has a lot to learn from China with respect to infrastructure development.

In October, Symphony entered into a strategic partnership with CTSpace, a web-based collaboration company. CTSpace in return has transferred its Pune R&D subsidiary and employees to Symphony.

Wipro is one of the competitors for Symphony in India.

According to Brooks, the market for embedded companies is $14 billion for 2008. The company has built a very plush office in Pune with a sitting capacity of 1,400 employees and is set to buy more such places.

Source: www.ndtvprofit.com

Philips CEO Gerard Kleisterlee is planning to outsource Philips payroll and it is believed that Infosys is the top contender in the outsourcing race.

In July this year, Philips created a ripple in the Indian Information technology enabled services (ITES) space when it outsourced some non-core functions to Infosys. It is a part of Kleisterlee’s strategy to focus on core activities and drive productivity.

As CEO of Philips, Gerard Kleisterlee wants direct contact with key markets. But there’s more to the India connection. The expected deal comes right after the July move when Philips outsourced finance accounting and the processing of purchase orders to Infosys.

Infosys also acquired three shared service centres in India, Poland and Thailand absorbing 1,400 Philips BPO staff in the process.

“We would look at who has expertise in this particular domain because it is all about expertise and scale in such fields. A partner with good scale and the right sort of expertise for us would be the first discussion partner,” said Gerard Kleisterlee.

“Usually we approach two or three companies in the field and figure out where we have the best fit. This is the start of a new relationship-a new partnership. And you do that for the long-term,” he elaborated.

The payroll for 17,000 staff in The Netherlands has been outsourced to a local firm. Now it is a question of scaling up to cover 105,3000 employees across the globe.

Both Genpact and WNS are well suited for the job but both have their hands full at the moment, which leaves the field clear for the BPO arms of Infosys, Wipro and TCS to make a strong pitch.