Amtex Systems to invest Rs 22 crore in BPO foray

Amtex Systems Inc, a New York-based IT consulting and services firm having offshore development centres in Chennai and New Delhi, has announced its foray into the BPO space.

The move is in line with the company's strategy to garner more revenues per customer from its existing customer base by providing hybrid, integrated service offering.

The company has earmarked a budget of Rs 22 crore for the BPO foray and has already invested a portion of it to set up a 300-seat facility in Chennai, which will be its focal point for India-centric growth.

Addressing a press conference, Sunny Pokala, president and chief executive officer, Amtex Systems Inc, said the strategy to provide integrated offerings came on the heels of the emerging demand for bundled services, a combination of back office and front office operations, from its existing customer base of 200.

With consulting at the front-end and IT infrastructure, application development, testing, system integration and remote IT infrastructure management at the back-end, BPO was seen as the only missing link.

With this expansion, the company expects to address the needs of the entire chain of customers, he said.

"The BPO arm complements and adds to our capabilities while opening a new revenue stream. The BPO offerings will be more on transformational solutions than mere transactional," added Pokala.

The BPO operations will be a separate business division under the company's Indian subsidiary, Amtex Infotech Pvt Ltd, which started its operations by the end of December last year. It has been providing support to 10 global customers, including some Fortune 500 companies.

Amtex provides consulting services to finance, healthcare and telecom sectors, and has hired 250 people for the BPO arm. It expects to ramp up the headcount to 1,000 by 2008.

The company expects its BPO arm to garner a revenue of $15 million by the end 2007 when the total revenue is expected to be about $60 million (excluding BPO).

Founded by Pokala in 1997, Amtex has a global offshore development centre in Chennai with a headcount of 1,000, which the company expects to scale up to 2,500 by 2008.

The company has also committed to invest about Rs 100 crore to set up a plug-n-play development centre in Siruseri, the IT corridor of Chennai.

The 6-lakh sft facility, which is expected to be ready by 2008, will focus on large global players looking at data centres, disaster recovery centres, remote IT infrastructure management in the telecom, BFSI and healthcare verticals.

With 12 offices in six locations in the US, UK and India, the company employs over 1,500 globally.