Kanbay to invest $50m in India

Kanbay International, Inc, a global IT services firm focused on the financial services industry, will be investing $50 million in India in 2006. The investment will be for the development of its campus in Hyderabad and a learning centre in Pune.

Kanbay has also announced the opening of a Centre of Excellence (CoE) for enterprise resource planning (ERP) in Hyderabad.

Addressing the media on Thursday, Ken Coppins, executive vice-president (ERP solutions), Kanbay International Inc, said, "The new CoE in Hyderabad will focus on application development and maintenance, software upgrade, configuration, legacy migration and maintenance and support. Our decision to set up a CoE in Hyderabad follows our recent agreement to acquire Adjoined Consulting Inc. Adjoined's predominant business involves implementation, hosting and support of major ERP systems including SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft and Siebel."

Kanbay had signed an agreement to acquire Adjoined for $165 million, of which the cash component is $95.7 million and equity is $69.3 million. With this acquisition, the combined entity is looking at ending 2006 with revenues of $370 million. For 2005, Kanbay had revenues of $230.5 million.

Kanbay employs around 100 ERP professionals in Hyderabad. "We will be adding another 200 ERP resources this year," Coppins said.

The company employs 4,400 people in India, comprising more than 70 per cent of its global people strength.

Meanwhile, Kanbay's 15-acre campus in Hyderabad is likely to be ready by mid-April of this year. The campus will have the capacity to house around 3,500 associates. Kanbay's global learning centre in Pune is expected to be ready by June this year.