Symphony to up headcount in India

Symphony Services India, the offshore captive arm of the US entity, plans to double its market analysis team in India by end of 2005.

"We have around 600 people currently working in Bangalore in the division. This makes us the largest third party market analytics service provider globally. We will be looking to double the team by the end of the year," said Ajay Kela, president of the India operations.

This is in keeping with the company's continuing work in the field of market analytics, covering business intelligence and data warehousing, whose outsourced potential has been notched at $1.5-2.5 billion.

"In fact, Gartner predicts that business intelligence and data warehousing services across verticals to be $26.4 billion in 2007 growing at a CAGR of 8.9 per cent. Of these, the three service lines of business consulting, IT consulting and managed services account for 40 per cent of the total with a 15.1 per cent CAGR," said Mark Nelson, Executive VP of the Analytics Group, Symphony.

The analytics group concentrates on the manufactureing, retail and wholesale sectors along with the communications verticals to offer its market analytics services.

The group, along with the spend management division, contributed $8 million to total revenues of $22 million in 2003 and in 2004, while total revenues more than doubled, the groups contribution increased to $17.6 million.

The hiring in India will occur among gradutes in mathematics and other pure sciences among others. "Market analytics offers an opportunity for India to move out of labour arbitrage and up the value chain," said Kela.

When asked about whether the growth of the company would continue along the same lines, Nelson said, "We don't see any need to worry about growth not happening or slowing down in the next few years."

He added that most of the analytics work, more than 50 per cent of it could be carried on offshore, requiring an onsite presence only where direct interactions were needed.

Symphony Services which was started by Romesh Wadhwani in 2000, counts around 2000 people as its employees in India. Market analytics is one of the major divisions of the company the others being development services for software products and spend management solutions. The market analytics and spend management groups work in unison often since they both cover the area of analysis.

In October 2004, the company acquired In-Reality,a Pune based software product development company. In 2001, Symphony had committed $100 million to the expansion of the Indian operations and had also announced in 2004 that they would be expanding their overall team in India to 4000 employees.

According to Kela, most of the additions in the market analytics group will happen in the Bangalore centre, where all of the team is based as of now.