30 Minute Interview

“We are looking for one acquisition each within and outside India in the coming year”

Peter Harrison, CEO, Induslogic on his company’s plans with regard to Outsourcing Product Development (OPD) in India

How do you find India as a destination for OPD?

India as an OPD centre is very big. Strong domain knowledge and global exposure provide a good stepping stone for Indian IT companies to look at developing software products. We have 1,000 people in India. We have couple of clients in this country who have headquarters in the US. It was not a rich market for us till now but the scenario has been changing. India does not have a good product market, though IT market on the whole is growing. As Nasscom has estimated the Indian OPD market to be worth $10 billion, we are targeting 10 percent of this amount.

Are you planning to acquire anymore Indian companies after Lambent Technologies?

We have recently acquired Nagpur-based mobile product engineering company Lambent Technologies. With the acquisition we have been able to get customers like Sony Digital and AutoDesk along with 20 customers from the mobile industry. The acquisition would help us to work in the mobile industry. We are looking for one acquisition each within and outside India in the coming year. We are having talks with 25 Indian companies in the OPD segment, typically those with a 200 to 500 employee base. Especially we are looking for companies in Hyderabad, Pune and Chennai. We are scouting for companies having experience in fields such as telecom, VoIP, finance, security, and storage-related products.

What are your plans for Indian operations?

We are planning to add another 500 people to our existing 800 employees in Noida and 100 in Nagpur by the end of this year. We are having two infrastructure facilities in Noida and planning to add one more. This year we have hired 200 engineers from different universities across India and talks are on with other universities for recruitment. We are looking at high-end engineering sectors. We want to be agile by adding quality people to our team. We are growing at 100 percent year-on-year for the last three years and planning to continue the same growth rate for the coming years.

How would you describe your relationship with Mantas in India?

We have strategic alliance with Mantas India and have already started working with them. 95 percent of Mantas India workforce is working with us. They have complex and sophisticated products, which need higher domain expertise. For Mantas, we are handling software product development and behaviour detection technology that covers intelligent analysis of financial data. With Mantas, we have added to our Center of Excellence services with regard to developing and maintaining enterprise class data warehousing products and we expect our revenues in this field to go up substantially.

—Chirasrota Jena