Infrastructure management services company Appnomic Systems has secured Rs 20 crore in funding from venture capital firm Norwest Venture Partners. This is the first institutional round of funding for Bangalore-headquartered Appnomic, which the firm will deploy into funding its expansion plans in the US market and strengthening its product and services offerings base.
This is Norwest Partners’ third investment in the next-generation services sector in India. Norwest managing partner Promod Haque will now join Appnomic’s board of directors. Haque said that next-generation services like infrastructure management services (IMS) have been predicted to become as large as the application development and maintenance (ADM) sector, and is regarded as the third wave of outsourcing after ADM and BPO/KPO.
Norwest currently manages over $2.5 billion in venture capital globally and has interests in software, services, enterprise and communications systems, semiconductor, Internet, new media and consumer companies. “As pressure grows on corporations to manage their IT infrastructures more economically, we believe that 70-75 per cent of IMS opportunities can be offshored,” Haque said. Appnomic has been delivering application performance management and services delivery automation on its hosted platforms to leading companies in the Web and BPO/KPO sectors.
“We are seeing our customer requirements moving to just accessing a business service, while the entire ecosystem of application, IT systems, IT operations and management, and business process services is being offered on a hosted model,”
D Padmanabhan, managing director and chief executive officer of Appnomics, said.
Viewing a good window of opportunity in greater broadband penetration in India, Norwest has invested in companies like travel portal Yatra.com, commerce website Sulekha.com and Adventity, a financial KPO services provider.
The Palo Alto, California-based VC made its first direct investment in India in 2005 with a $13.8-million fund injection in Persistent Systems. Since then, Haque and his team have carried out cross-border investments in over 20 companies headquartered in the US, but running extensive operations in India.