European IT outsourcing services provider Logica, which started its Indian operation in 1998 to harness the abundant talent pool available here, has now started looking at opportunities in the local market, which has prompted most of the global as well as Indian service providers to re-energise their strategies. The UK-based company is in the final process of devising its ‘2010 strategy’ which will help the company to identify areas where the company sees growth in the Indian market, and where they have the expertise.
“We would probably close our 2010 strategy around November this year. We are looking at variety of ways to increase our sales competency in existing areas that we support. We are still debating on the specific areas that we want to focus on India as a part of our domestic sales,” Abhay Gupte, CEO, Logica India told Business Standard.
Logica (then LogicaCMG) started its operations in India with initial focus on selling its finance solutions locally and then reselling and integrating a suite of third-part retail banking products. This was followed by the company providing offshore IT services in India in 2000. Today, the company employs close to 3,800 people in its two offshore centres in the country located in Bangalore and Chennai.
Gupte said even though the company was present in India for more than a decade, it had never looked at India as a serious market. “Frankly, we had not looked at India as a serious market where we would do business. In some of these (where the company has offshore centres), we do little bit of local business. These countries were important to us more from our offshore delivery capability perspective point of view,” he added.
Even though Logica has a few customers in India in the domain of telecom, energy and utility and financial services space, the RBI is a publicly announced customer of Logica. The company, in 2001, has bagged a contract worth $16 million (Rs 75 crore) from the RBI to implement Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) system to enable inter-bank payment across the country. As a part of the contract also supplied its ‘Quaestor’ banking product to 205 Indian banks and financial institutions to enable their direct participation in the RTGS system. Logica claims that other than the payment space, it sees opportunities in the areas of energy, utility and telecom (EUT) space. However, the company’s strategy would be to only focus on those specific technology areas where it has global expertise.
“It is important for us to get into markets where we have the expertise, and that is why clients would buy services from us. It would not be our strategy to case every deal, but to chase deals which would require us to bring our expertise here,” Gupte added.
Other than India, Logica’s key offshore centres are located in Morocco and Philippines where the company employs about 500-600 people each. The company which reported revenue of £3.6 in 2008, employs close to 40,000 people globally.