Oct. 13, 2009 (The Hindu Business Line) --
T.E. Raja Simhan
Chennai, Oct. 13 Virtusa, the Nasdaq-listed software company, is joining a list of US-based companies with offshore centres in India to tap business opportunities in the domestic market for providing information technology services.
Cognizant Technology Solutions and Perot Systems (NYSE:PER) have sharpened focus on the Indian market and now Virtusa wants a share of the domestic pie. Nasscom has projected the domestic IT-BPO market projected to grow at a higher rate – between 15 and 18 per cent – this year, to reach around Rs 67,000 crore compared with Rs 57,000 crore last year.
“We have initiated marketing activities for engaging customers in India. We will start with information technology consulting services. From April we will set targets and start getting revenues,” said Mr Sumit Sood, Vice-President, Middle East and Asia, Virtusa (India) Pvt Ltd.
At present, North America contributes 72 per cent of the company’s revenues, which was $172.9 million for fiscal ended March 31, 2009, Europe 26 per cent and Rest of the World (2 per cent), he said.
Focus area
Virtusa will tap clients in sectors such as banking, financial service and insurance, telecom and media and entertainment to provide consulting services for clients to implement software services. The 600-plus captive centres of various multinational companies is another focus area. The company has started doing work with four captive centres, he said.
Chennai, for instance, is known as the ‘Financial Back Office’ hub of the country, housing some of the biggest captive units of financial institutions such as World Bank, RBS, Standard Chartered to name a few. The business model of captives is changing from ‘seat-based revenue model to utility/outcome-based model’ with technology helping in the background, he said.
The Indian BPO (business process outsourcing) is another sector that will need ‘transformational service’. Earlier it was seat-based pricing and the number of full-time employees who can cover so many clients. Now it is utility-based and outcome-based operations.
“The scene is moving from number of calls made on my [client] behalf to result-based on the number of customers whose service requests resolved within an hour or the dollar revenue you helped me to generate. The challenge is that BPOs need the right technology platform for this transition,” he said.
