BMC Software to create government vertical as it taps into India market

Company sees huge growth opportunity with technology dependent programmes being implemented by govt like Digital India

The $2.5 billion software solutions provider BMC Software is gearing up its presence in the country and soon will foray into the government sector with its products, said senior officials.

With huge technology dependent programmes being implemented by the government like Digital India, Make in India and others, the company sees huge growth opportunity.

"In the last two-and-a-half years the government has emerged as a large enterprise. I feel that the government owns a lot of core services and for the distribution of these services technology will be crucial. We are in the midst of creating our government vertical strategy," said Sunil Kumar Thakur, country director, BMC Software India. This will also include creating a new team which can think and work with the government departments.

Thakur who took over the helm of the company in the country earlier this year, is also not too much perturbed by the fact that the government sector has not been paying its due to IT vendors on time. "We do not get impacted directly due to this. Since we work with SI's we are impacted indirectly," he added.

For BMC Asia Pacific has been a big growth market with India being the bright spot. Thakur declined to share India numbers as the company does not break out its geo-specific numbers.

Thakur also wants to strengthen its channel network. "We have two channel strategy. The first is working with systems integrators like the top four Indian IT services player, they continue to be core to our operations. The second are the tier II or smaller vendors. We want to strengthen our presence in the tier II and the SME segment," added he.

The company founded in 1988 has come a long way from providing solutions to mainframe systems to catering to distributed computed and now to a services-based industry. The company, globally, has underwent three evolution. From being a mainframe focused software developer to catering to the dotcom players and now catering to cloud computing and mobile platform.

India remains to be a central part of the company's growth plans. Its research and development centre in Pune has 1,600 engineers, it is one of the largest single facility for the company around the globe. The company has a total of 1,900 employees in India.