Sapient plans 2nd centre in Bangalore

The US-based $200 million Sapient Corporation, a software engineering services firm which already has 50 per cent of its 1,700 workforce in India, will be setting up its second development centre in Bangalore.

The expansion will eventually see 60 per cent of its total staff in India. The company already has a development centre in New Delhi with 800 software professionals and may add around 400 developers in the Bangalore centre.

Sapient co-chairman and CEO Jerry A Greenberg said: "We were among the early adopters of the global distributed delivery model for software services and have been honing these skills and this have given us the edge over other software services firm.

"We did look at outsourcing to third-party vendors, but it is essential for our clients that they get our well-established practices and processes for their work. We are aggressively offshoring projects to India and with increased business, we are opening our second development centre in Bangalore."

Greenberg said: "Our best practises enable us to make project management much more successful than the average industry standard. We were pioneers in integrating open systems, client server computing, distributed computing models, mobile computing, object-oriented analysis and programming and, of course, the internet."

"IT initiatives fail to deliver business value at an alarming rate, and the reasons are well-documented and consistent across industries. We have been perfecting our approach to overcome the root causes of failures by employing tools and techniques that build consensus, speed and momentum and guide programs from planning to management and execution," he said.

Greenberg said Sapient might look at a third centre in India in due time. The company has an attrition rate of around 17 per cent in India, "which is a concern, but which will be eventually ironed out."