Collabera to ramp up headcount in South India

IT services provider Collabera, formerly known as Global Consultants Inc (GCI), plans to significantly increase its presence in South India by opening more delivery centres over the next two years.

The privately-held company, founded 16 years ago, presently has its offices in Bangalore, Baroda, Thiruvananthapuram and Mumbai with the employee base touching 1,500 in India.

The US-based company's staff strength outside India (US and Europe) is close to 3,000. The company's Indian operations came through the acquisition of Microland's offshore outsourcing firm Planetasia in 2005.

"For the last three years, the focus of the company has been on expanding Indian operations. In the next two years, we want the staff strength of our Indian operations to touch 4,000. India will continue to drive growth for the company," said Collabera Chief Strategy Officer Jawahar Bekay.

As part of the expansion plans, the company opened a development centre recently in Bangalore to accommodate 400 personnel. The size of the existing Thiruvananthapuram development centre will be doubled to 600. The company is also looking at setting up another development centre either in Hyderabad or Coimbatore.

"We are keen on opening a centre in Coimbatore owing to the availability of talent, infrastructure and lower operational costs. It will also help us provide better support to our customer base," Bekay added.

Collabera, which has 90-100 active clients, recorded $300 million in sales in 2007. "We are witnessing a year-on-year growth rate of 20-25 per cent. Our pipelines are robust and we continue to see growth in some segments of business," he stated.

The company derives over 90 per cent of its revenue from the US serving clients such as Bank of America, J P Morgan, AT&T, Coke and Verizon. It is now focusing on Europe and the Asia Pacific region for growth. Recently, Collabera acquired Thiruvananthapuram-based IVL India, which provides post implementation services for SAP customers.

Traditionally, Application Development Maintenance (ADM) has been the single largest revenue generator (60 per cent) for the company. It has identified SAP practice and software testing services as emerging areas.

Apart from ADM, Collabera provides enterprise software solutions, outsourced product development and business intelligence, and data warehousing to industries such as financial services, technology, communications, media, manufacturing, retail and logistics.

Last year, Collabera secured $30 million in funding from Oak Investment Partners.