Sierra Atlantic on the lookout for SAP practice

Plans a Bangalore centre in Q2 of 2005

Sierra Atlantic, a US-based IT and software products engineering service provider, is on the lookout for an acquisition in the area of SAP services in India.

The company, which has been building its own SAP practice for some time, wants to take the inorganic route to augment its services and clientele that much faster.

"Our own SAP team is small at only 50 people. We are looking at a 100-man operation which has a reasonable amount of international clients in their kitty. We have earmarked slightly less than $10 million for the acquisition," said Sanjay Khendry, VP, Sierra Atlantic.

He added that though that the company would continue to grow its own SAP practice and, if not able to find the right candidate for acquisition by the first quarter of 2005, would drop the idea of acquisition. Apart from that, the company, which has three development units in Hyderabad with over 850 employees, is planning a Bangalore centre by the second quarter of 2005.

"We plan to hire around 500 people in Bangalore during the initial phase of growth next year. The centre will concentrate on integration and product engineering services. An investment of $1.5 million has been chalked out for it. Meanwhile, we will increase our Hyderabad strength to 1,500 next year and move to a single new campus by end of 2005," said Khendry.

The single campus will be built in two phases amounting to a total investment of $12 million.

The Indian arm of Sierra Atlantic was started in 1994 as a cost centre. The units in Hyderabad are involved in all of the company's IT services including enterprise application integration and implementation, for which the company has partnerships with major ERP vendors including Oracle and Peoplesoft.

While they continue to be involved in the company's product re-engineering services, many of the organisation's own products have come out of the India centres.

"FormsGenie is a migration tool of ours that is pretty active in the market. Besides, we have a set of application network products including Customer Relationship Management Network (CRMnet), Supply Chain Management Network (SCMnet) and Human Capital Management Network (HCMnet). Everything connected with these products, except for project management, is done out of India," said Khendry.

The parent company, Sierra Atlantic Inc., is based out of Fremont, California. The company registers revenues of $20 million to $40 million every year of which about 8 per cent comes from their product IP, while close to 35 per cent is contributed by the IP that they work on as part of their product engineering services.