Virtusa to hire 400 more in Hyd

Massachusetts-based Virtusa Corporation, which offers software engineering services and solutions, today said that it expected to hire another 400 software professionals for its Hyderabad office in the current year. The venture-funded privately held company also expects to breach the $100 million mark in revenues in the next financial year.

Santanu Paul, general manager and global head of productisation, Virtusa, told Business Standard, that the company which had over 1,000 employees at Hyderabad was all set to add another 400 to its headcount in the city. The company which has about 1,900 employees on its rolls spread across its offices in Hyderabad, Chennai, Colombo and the US.

"We have been growing very fast. In the last five years, Virtusa has grown between 50 and 70 per cent year-on-year across all the four verticals that we are present in," Paul said. The seven-year-old company has been venture funded to the tune of $45 million and has been making profits for the last couple of quarters.

"We have grown from a zero employee base in Hyderabad to have about 1,000 employees in the last three-and-a-half years. Additionally, we opened a centre in Chennai and we expect to recruit a total of about 500 employees there in the course of the year. In Hyderabad we will add another 400 employees though we did not expect to initially recruit these kind of numbers so soon," he said. The company is also expected to add close to 50,000 sq ft of space in the coming year.

Virtusa which has 35 clients on its roster operates in the BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance), retail, telecom segments apart from offering its engineering services to independent software vendors. "We offer engineering services for software vendors who can outsource their requirements to us," he said.

The company had in July last year announced that it would be spending $11 million at its Hyderabad centre and indicated that new client acquisition was a strong growth driver during the last fiscal, with over 20 new clients entering into multi-year revenue relationships with Virtusa.

Leading clients include names like Bank One Corporation (it recently merged with JP Morgan), Siemens, Shaw's Supermarkets and Pegasystems. Bank One is the company's single biggest client and accounts for close to 15 per cent of the total revenues.

Virtusa also has a unique productisationâ„¢ methodology which it claims brings unparalleled value to clients. "By virtue of our experience building complex and cutting-edge releases for leading organizations, we have developed a unique productisation methodology that introduces the benefits traditionally enjoyed by product companies to enterprises engaged in building custom solutions," Paul said.

The productisation strategy involves using a component based framework to software development. The framework acts both as an evaluation tool as well as a roadmap that allows an enterprise, working with Virtusa, to gain increasingly greater efficiencies and leverage over time across its various IT investments, in a manner that is quantifiable and measurable.