Zensar plans retail foray

Software services company Zensar Technologies (Zensar) has tailored its strategy around the opportunities in the retail sector as well as "non-voice" category of the business process outsourcing space. It has also planned an initiative to pitch for projects from Indian businesses.

This, in addition to the company's "workhorse" offerings in the manufacturing, financial services and acquisition services, will collectively push the sales turnover to over Rs 500 crore by the end of the next year.

Ganesh Natarajan, Zensar's deputy chairman and managing director told Business Standard that after spending considerable time and capital resources in building up capacities, the company is now ready for the leap. It is eyeing significantly higher margins leading to a healthier bottom line.

Elaborating on the roadmap to this target, Ganesh said the company has identified five thrust areas to leap-frog its topline.

"These include application modernisation (involving migration from the legacy systems such as IBM Mainframe, to the latest technologies like J2EE or dotNet), retail back-end management, financial servies, acquisition business comprising SAP or Oracle implementations and product engineering, including development of software products and related IP assets. We expect to grow at 100 per cent per year in these areas, going by the potential they offer," he said.

Ganesh said the total opportunity in the area of migration from Mainframe to other technologies is estimated at $75 billion, though the ''addressable'' opportunity out of this estimate would be in the area of roughly $10 billion.

"With our capabilities and cost advantage, we expect to get a significant chunk of this business," he asserted.

Describing the retail business as a promising sector, Ganesh said the company has recently won projects from two major clients, one each in the US and UK and hopes to win many such projects in the near future. Zensar is looking at the retail sector to contribute nearly 10 per cent of its turnover, he added.

The company plans to expand its presence in the European sub-continent and open more offices in addition to its office in Finland.

In the non-voice BPO area, the company will pitch for engagements in HR shared services excluding payroll, and accounting back-office management.

"Armed with a 10,000-seat Peoplesoft enterprise management software and tools designed in-house, we are able to do 50 per cent of the work in automated mode, bringing down the employee cost significantly; this adds to our competitiveness and profitability."

The company has also taken a serious note of the growing scales available in the Indian market and has plans to set up a team under its India Middle East unit for the business on home ground.

"We currently earn a small revenue, less than 1 per cent, from the Indian projects and want to take it to 5 per cent in the next five years' time" Ganesh stated.