Mindlance lines-up $100 mn investment; eyes acquisitions

Bangalore-headquartered IT major, Mindlance, plans to invest around $100 million in India over the next two to three years besides eyeing acquisitions in the infrastructure management space, a senior company official said.

"We plan to invest $100 million over the next two to three years, mainly for scaling-up our infrastructure, setting up more offices and delivery centres across the country and ramping-up our headcount," Mindlance's CIO and Business Unit Head-IT Infrastructure, Kamal Sharma, told PTI here.

Mindlance, a New Jersey-based IT infrastructure service-provider entered the Indian market in 2003 and presently has five sales and delivery centres here -- three in Bangalore and one each in Mumbai and Delhi.

"We plan to set up three more at Pune, Hyderabad and Ahmedabad in the next three months," he said, adding "we also plan to ramp-up our headcount by 450 in the next four months."
   
Currently, the company has a staff-strength of 485.
   
The company will fund its pan-India expansion through internal accruals "as we are a cash-rich company," he said.
   
It was also exploring the inorganic growth-route, he said, adding acquisitions in the infrastructure management space were on the company's radar.

"We are looking at deals in $10-40 million range. It (acquisition) is on our agenda but will take some time," Sharma said.
   
"Currently, we are focusing on consolidating ourselves in the Indian market," he said.
   
The company, with its key focus areas being remote IT management, consulting, on-storage and data management and IT security, initially focused on its global clients but in the last one-year has begun concentrating on the domestic market in a big way.
   
"Globally, we have 110 customers of which 95 per cent are Fortune 500 blue-chips. In India, in the last five-months we have garnered 20 clients. We are targeting 50 customers by end-this year," Sharma added.