Source: inhome.rediff.com

IT services provider Collabera, formerly known as Global Consultants Inc (GCI), plans to significantly increase its presence in South India by opening more delivery centres over the next two years.

The privately held company, founded 16 years ago, presently has its offices in Bangalore, Baroda, Thiruvananthapuram and Mumbai with the employee base touching 1,500 in India.

The US-based company’s staff strength outside India (US and Europe) is close to 3,000. The company’s Indian operations came through the acquisition of Microland’s offshore outsourcing firm Planetasia in 2005.

“For the last three years, the focus of the company has been on expanding Indian operations. In the next two years, we want the staff strength of our Indian operations to touch 4,000. India will continue to drive growth for the company,” said Collabera Chief Strategy Officer Jawahar Bekay.

As part of the expansion plans, the company opened a development centre recently in Bangalore to accommodate 400 personnel. The size of the existing Thiruvananthapuram development centre will be doubled to 600. The company is also looking at setting up another development centre either in Hyderabad or Coimbatore.

“We are keen on opening a centre in Coimbatore owing to the availability of talent, infrastructure and lower operational costs. It will also help us provide better support to our customer base,” Bekay added.

Collabera, which has 90-100 active clients, recorded $300 million in sales in 2007. “We are witnessing a year-on-year growth rate of 20-25 per cent. Our pipelines are robust and we continue to see growth in some segments of business,” he stated.

The company derives over 90 per cent of its revenue from the US serving clients such as Bank of America, J P Morgan, AT&T, Coke and Verizon. It is now focusing on Europe and the Asia Pacific region for growth. Recently, Collabera acquired Thiruvananthapuram-based IVL India, which provides post implementation services for SAP customers.

Traditionally, Application Development Maintenance (ADM) has been the single largest revenue generator (60 per cent) for the company. It has identified SAP practice and software testing services as emerging areas.

Apart from ADM, Collabera provides enterprise software solutions, outsourced product development and business intelligence, and data warehousing to industries such as financial services, technology, communications, media, manufacturing, retail and logistics.

Last year, Collabera secured $30 million in funding from Oak Investment Partners.

Source: economictimes.indiatimes.com

US defence systems major Raytheon on Tuesday said it was looking forward to more collaborations with Indian firms as it considers the country as a potential future global outsourcing destination.

The company on Tuesday signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Noida-based Precision Electronics Ltd for joint development of superior communications technology for Indian military.

“Currently we do not have any outsourcing activities from India through alliances we have with firms here for offset projects. But we see a huge potential there,” Raytheon International President (Asia) Walter F Doran told PTI.

He said in the past one year the company had signed MoUs with as many as five Indian firms taking the total so far to eight.

“As the government’s policy on offset programmes develops, there is a potential for us (with the Indian partner) to cater not only to India’s requirements but also to other global markets,” he said, however, adding that a lot would depend on the government policies on both sides.

He said as India had just about started opening up to the US for defence procurement, the country is a relatively new market for most of the US defence firms but said Raytheon would like to be a long term player here.

Through the company’s MoU with Precision, the partners would jointly pursue emerging business opportunities and provide for in-country production and long term support.

Already Rahtheon has collaborations with Indian companies, including Tata Power, L&T, Wipro, Bharat Electronics and Godrej & Boyce.