Symphony Services to invest $150 mn in India

Symphony Services, a $100 million US-based firm focussing on outsourced product development services, has announced that it plans to invest $150 million to expand its Indian operations over the next year.

The company, whose majority of its 3,000 development strength is based in India, also said that they plan to add 2,000 more developers by the end of current year. The company is planning to set up new campuses in Bangalore, Mumbai and Pune for this expansion.

Ajay Kela, Symphony Services' president for India operations told reporters on Wednesday that the new campus which was coming up on Outer Ring Road area in Bangalore could house 3,500 people.

Putting together the expansions in Bangalore, Mumbai and Pune, Symphony was planning to complete the construction of 6.5 lakh sq. ft. of area in the current calender. "The investment for these expansion will be around $150 million," Kela informed.

The company, in addition ot OPD, is also riding high on analytics-based knowledge process outsourcing (KPO).

Quoting Nasscom president Kiran Karnik, Kela said Symhony Services' areas of focus, OPD and KPO, had been identified as the segments that would take Indian IT services capabilities to the next level on the world IT map.

"Nasscom recognises the potential of IT services companies like Symphony Services in the OPD and KPO space and is confident that these companies will play crucial role in making India the hub of all outsourcing needs," he pointed out.

About setting up campuses in Mumbai and Pune, Kela said, while the facility in Mumbai would cater to the analytics processes wing of the company, having a strong pool of professionals having domain expertise and data process analytics skills, Pune was the obvious choice for having some of the best engineering talents in the country.

He, however, said that Bangalore would continue to be the hub of the company's India operations. Presently, while 70 per cent of the company's revenue comes from outsourced product development, 30 per cent comes from analytics-based knowledge process outsourcing. In the years ahead, the company was targetting greater chunk of its business from KPO segment, Kela informed.

The company, which manages more than 99 per cent of its clients' operations from India, is also planning to recruit freshers as part of its massive expansion plan.

"Out of the 2,000 people we are planning to hire this calender, 5-8 per cent will be freshers who will be subsequently given on-the-job training at the Symphony Academy," Kela said adding that 30-40 per cent of the new recruits would come from product background.

As regards to the complaints from various quarters in the IT industry about the shortage of skilled manpower, Kela said though this was to some extent true, in cities like Bangalore at least this was not a big problem.

"We are getting in an average of at least three resumes every day."

He, however, said product companies like Symphony could not afford giving preference to freshers only. "Freshers, once recruited, can hone the skills on domain working with our experienced technical teams and for that, the recruitment of freshers will be as per the manageable proportion only," Kela said.

Symphony Services' CEO and president Gordon Brooks said besides the growing competitions from many emerging players like China, Russia and Philippines, India would continue to remain as the prime base from the company's outsourced product development works.

He, however, said that the company was considering the importance of China as the next location for its expansion plan and in the process, it might acquire some firms there.