Progress Software to enter India soon

To set up direct operations in Bangalore; expand Hyerabad R&D centre.

US-based Progress Software Corporation (PSC) is in the process of setting up direct operations in India in Bangalore, besides planning to expand its product development centre at Hyderabad by the end of November 2008.

The company has been doing business in India for over a decade through its distributors as well as application partners such as QAD, Epicor and Infor. Progress Software is a provider of application infrastructure software to develop, deploy, integrate and manage business applications.

"This is part of PSC's strategy to be closer to the domestic market as well as to support in the export of Indian expertise via systems integrators (SIs). There has been a tremendous level of interest for the company's service-oriented architecture (SOA) product suite coming from India in specific. PSC is making a conscious effort to further support that," Nicholas Tang, managing director of Progress Software, told Business Standard.

Stating that India serves as both important domestic market and centre of excellence from the development perspective, he said the world-class pool of talent in India had made it a compelling reason for the company to have its largest development centre outside of the US.

"Today, the Hyderabad centre handles most of PSC's product lines and the output quality has been very high. So, there is an effort to grow this centre by a fair bit. Currently with 100 employees at its third year, Progress is planning to expand the Hyderabad centre to 150 by the end of the current financial year, and have more product development work focusing on IP generation," Tang said.

Progress Software, through its around 2,000 application partners worldwide, provides over 5,000 applications to a broad range of verticals. It is active in finance, manufacturing and service sectors in Asia.

According to Tang, PSC currently derives 45 per cent of its revenues from the Americas region, 45 per cent from the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region and the rest from Asia Pacific.

"India is a very important part of PSC's growth plan in Asia Pacific. Its rise in the business world makes it an important market for us to focus on. We expect Asia Pacific region to contribute 15 per cent to our overall revenues in about three years," he said.

Progress Software's turnover in the fiscal year ended November 30, 2007, stood at $494 million (around Rs 1,976 crore). Its projections for the current fiscal is around $534 million (Rs 2,136 crore).