Aditi Technologies may shift focus to services

With the spending on software products taking a hit owing to the recessionary trend in the global market, Aditi Technologies, an outsourced product development (OPD) firms in India, is shifting its strategy by offering software services to the companies in the financial services sector.

The company which works with global financial institutions to develop software products for them, is now planning to offer services in the areas of business intelligence (BI) and collaboration portal management, Pradeep Rathinam who has now been re-designated the CEO of the company told Business Standard.

“Our focus will not be on vanilla services offerings, but this will mostly be product and framework-specific. We have built some frameworks on BI and collaboration, and intend to approach our enterprise clients in the financial services space with these products to provide them with services,” he added. Rathinam who was earlier heading the North America business of the company has the president, has taken over as the CEO of the company from Pradeep Singh, the founder-chairman of the company. Singh will now serve as the executive chairman of the company.

Industry sources say that as the clients (mostly independent software vendors or software product firms) cut budget with the shrinking in demand for software products, the outsourced services providers like Aditi Technologies are under tremendous pressure. Even though companies in OPD space are not seeing any huge fall in the quantum of business, they are under serious margin pressure which is forcing them to look out for other areas of works to sustain. Other than Aditi Technologies, firms like Persistent Systems, Symphony Services and Aspire Systems provide OPD services.

In financial year 2008-09, Aditi reported a revenue of  $78mn which is 25 per cent higher than the previous year. In the previous year (2007), the company has grown 60 per cent year on year. In the present calendar year (2009), the company is expecting revenue growth to be flat.

Rathinam said, the company had over 50 major banks among its customers including UBS, Citibank, Bank of America and the number of these have come down to about 38 now after the spate of mergers and acquisitions in the recent months. The company has approached most of these banks with the services offerings, and expecting the practice to grow further.

“As of now, our financial services practice is relatively smaller. But we expect this to derive a revenue of $8-10 million this year alone.”

Aditi Technologies has about 100 active clients including close to 45 software product companies. The company provide product development support to companies like EDS, Motorola, Nokia and T-Mobile.