SQC to expand service portfolio in India

To bring in balanced scorecard system

Software Quality Center (SQC), an IT consulting and services company and subsidiary of US-headquartered SQC LLC, is expanding its services portfolio in India.

The company, which provides full service software process improvement and software quality assurance services, is soon introducing the 'balanced scorecard' system in India.

Besides, the company has plans to bring two more new services "� Intellectual Capital Management (ECM) and Earned Value Management (EVM) that monitors the value a company earned on a new product "� into India, primarily targeting IT companies.

Some of its present clients are L&T, Sasken, VisualSoft Technologies and DRDO.

Kris Puthucode, CEO, SQC LLC, told Business Standard that globally over 150 businesses had adopted the Balanced Scorecard System, a management system that allows CEOs to measure the performance of the companies at the enterprise level.

"We are now introducing this in India and want to make this accessible not just to IT companies, but to manufacturing businesses, banking and financial institutions as well," he said.

Balance Scorecard is a performance management system that enables organisations to clarify their vision and strategy and translate these into action. Developed in the early 1990s by Dr Robert Kaplan and David Norton, Balanced Scorecard is an open model system which is now owned and maintained by the US-based Balanced Scorecard Institute.

Puthucode said the whole system was based on nine different steps starting from organisational assessment to the final evaluation of the performance.

"We are also offering a certificate course on the balanced scorecard, which includes three modules. After the completion of the course, each participant will be awarded a professionals balanced scorecard practitioner certificate," Puthucode added.

SQC is a premier partner with the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) of the Carnegie Mellon University in the US. It primarily focuses on IT consulting and services but is gradually getting into the software product development side too.

Puthucode said that currently products constitute around 20-30 per cent of its total revenue, both in the US and India and "as we get more into knowing the customers' need through our association with them, we expect to improve our product portfolio".

In the calendar 2005, SQC LLC, the US parent company, had earned a revenue of $1 million, while the SQC, the Indian subsidiary, had earned a revenue of about $850,000.

"This year we plan to double our revenue in the US and reach the $1-million mark in India," he added.

SQC India at present operates from Bangalore and employs around 15 consultants.

Puthukode said that after bringing in new services portfolio into its kitty, the company planned to double the headcount in India and in the US, where it has similar number of people.