Sierra bullish on China market

Leveraging the combined offshore delivery operations from India and China, US-based offshoring enterprise applications and outsourced product development (OPD) services provider, Sierra Atlantic Inc, expects to derive over 20 per cent of its business from China in two to three years down the line.

The 15-year-old company has its global development centre in Hyderabad.

"This calendar year represents a strong opportunity for us to leverage the investments that we have made in acquiring Boston-based ArrAy and in setting up our new campus in Hyderabad last year, which gave us additional capabilities to grow and scale up faster. China, along with India, is a potential market for OPD services, and we see some large outsourcing deals to flow in from that market in 2008," Raju Reddy, founder and CEO of Sierra Atlantic, told Business Standard.

Sierra Atlantic had acquired ArrAy, a software engineering services company with global delivery centres in Guangzhou and Shanghai in China, last year.

The expanded geographic presence enabled the company to meet the increasing demands of its customers, providing offshore delivery from both India and China. Currently, China accounts for a little over 10 per cent of Sierra Atlantic's overall business.

"ArrAy has brought in 27 customer relationships into our fold and our focus is to grow this significantly in the current year. With the growing economy and the increasing IT spend by US and European multinationals on their Chinese operations, we expect to clinch two to three outsourcing deals every month from that geography, both in our New Oracle Economy (Oracle, Peoplesoft, Siebel and Agile) and OPD business segments," Reddy said.

Stating that the US market had been their biggest revenue spinner, contributing 75 per cent last year, he said with the company's new focus on China, West Asia, Europe and Asia Pacific, they expected these markets to account for 35 per cent this year, as against 25 per cent last year.

Backed by the increasing business from the existing customers and addition of new geographies, Sierra Atlantic is planning to add around 600 employees to its global headcount.

"A majority of them will be deployed in our offshore locations in India and China," Reddy added.

Sierra currently employs 1,750 globally, with around 1,300 of them working out of Hyderabad. The company has about 200 customers globally and expects to add 50 to 70 new clients this year.

In the last three years, Sierra Atlantic had made three acquisitions "� US-based provider of enterprise application outsourcing and consulting services firm Sceptre Database Consultants Inc in 2005, Interion of UK, an independent consultancy with delivery capabilities reaching throughout Europe, in 2006, and ArrAy in 2007.