Charging ahead

IN CONVERSATION

Peter Harrison, CEO of GlobalLogic, an outsource product development company, is all set to make acquisitions, adding a couple of new centres in various cities in India, and doubling its workforce. He tells Priyanka Joshi what else's up his sleeve

You have been talking of growing organically in India. How will that shape up in 2007-08?

The drive to create a new centre stems from the need to expand our ever-increasing recruitment obligations. We will be doubling our headcount by hiring more than 1,000 people and the best way to tap the talent pool, we thought, was to branch out.

We will be opening a new centre in western India that will house almost 500 employees by April, and another one in south India by the second half of the year. In all, we will be investing more than $50 million in India this year, and almost a third of it would be invested in developing the two new centres.

So, the need to spread out is actually to scout for a resourceful talent pool?

Yes, we are constantly challenged in recruiting. Since 70 per cent of our hiring is the senior level staff and for very specific product development work, we require an experienced set of manpower resources.

The new centres will operate as global centres of excellence (CoE) for specific purposes like storage area networks, embedded technologies and work in the logistics sector.

This is similar to what GlobalLogic has created in Noida "" a global CoE for Voice over Internet protocol or our Nagpur centre, which is global CoE for work on mobile or wireless products.

Will GlobalLogic be looking at acquisitions this year?

We have grown 140 per cent with acquisitions and almost 90 per cent organically. We acquired two smaller outsourced product development (OPD) companies as well as three captive labs that were into dedicated R&D.

We will announce our latest addition, which will mark our entry into a new expertise area, next week. It will be a small international company with established credentials in OPD. We plan to invest up to $5 million for acquisitions this year.

Besides, we will also enter the Japan and China markets through local acquisitions and add a centre in European markets as well.

GlobalLogic will set up an office in the UK in the next few months, a market that delivers 5 per cent of the revenues and that's set to grow to 10 per cent this year.

Will inorganic growth be a dominant streak in 2007 for GlobalLogic?

Seems likely. It's fairly manageable to integrate a smaller company or an R&D lab within GlobalLogic's framework. It's an incremental step for us. We will double our headcount, revenues and client base this year.

I expect, as we grow, we will have more revenue coming from outside of the US. Today 10 per cent of our revenues come from India and the number will hopefully double this year with the escalation of our Indian operations.