Mahindra Satyam to double West Asian workforce

 Mahindra & Mahindra's IT arm Mahindra Satyam plans to double its Middle East workforce in the next two years as part of a $24 million (87.8 million dirhams) global branding push, a senior company official has said.

The company has more than 300 staff in the region, with operations in the UAE, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Last week, Mahindra Satyam signed a deal with state-backed Oman firm Omran to provide support for major projects.

"As part of the global expansion strategy for Mahindra, we obviously take into account business growth," CEO C P Gurnani told Arabian Business magazine.

"We clearly know that the Gulf Cooperation Council and Middle East and North Africa (regions) are growing in terms of business velocity and momentum," he added.

Mahindra earlier this month inked a deal with US information systems giant Cisco, a key step in its bid to move beyond the Indian domestic market, where it has a hand in everything from auto manufacturing to computers.

After a decade in the region, the company was seeing a boom in GCC states like the UAE and Qatar. It was one of the pacesetters for Indian expansion into the Gulf, an ever-growing but relatively new market, Satyam's MENA head, Bobby Gupta, said.

In the Middle East, the Satyam-Cisco team will largely be focusing on helping clients implement cloud computing, considered the new frontier in IT.

This region "is going to be one of the biggest areas with Cisco. We're talking about water, energy management, catering to the needs of a digital consumer," he said.

"The Middle East will be big deal for us and Cisco as a market," he added.

The company said in a statement that it aims to see $500-700 million in profits over the next three to five years on a global scale as a result of the deal.