Sierra Atlantic to move into own campus

To cost $5mn, house 1,000 techies

As part of expanding its Indian operations, Sierra Atlantic is planning to move into its own campus. The company is in talks with the government for allotment of three acres of land in the vicinity of Hi-Tec City.

It envisages an investment of about $5 million on the campus, which is expected to seat over 1000 people.

"We expect that the campus will be ready within the next 18 to 24 months," Raju Reddy, the founder and chief executive officer of Sierra Atlantic, told Business Standard.

Sierra is at present occupies a 30,000-sqft space in SoftPro Heights and another 15,000 sqft in Karthik House, Banjara Hills.

When it was formerly Sierra Optima and a listed entity, the company was allotted two acres by the government for constructing its campus.

However, after it became a wholly-owned subsidiary of US-based Sierra Atlantic, the company returned the piece of land to the government as it had no immediate plans for construction of the campus.

Now, with its enterprise business applications integration business growing at a rapid pace, the company revived the campus plan.

Meanwhile, buoyed by the encouraging response to its product development and integration services offerings from global majors, Sierra is now planning to ramp up its team size from the existing 430 to 800 by the end of next year.

In an another major move, the company has listed out a few Indian companies, which have strong expertise in SAP implementation and upgradations, for acquisition.

"We are looking at a couple of companies that could accelerate our SAP business. We are keenly evaluating the strengths of these companies including their team sizes and their clients details in US and Europe," Reddy said, declining to disclose the names of the companies.

However, he indicated that the consideration to be paid against the acquisitions would be a combination of cash and stock swap. The company plans to strengthen its presence in Europe through the acquisition.

Sierra Atlantic has recently launched a development hub to provide services for PeopleSoft applications.

Over the next two years, the company will invest about $ 2 million to build a world-class PeopleSoft practice, which is the second largest practice for the company after Oracle, with about 100 people working on the practice. About 160 of the total employees of the company are working on Oracle practice.

The company has also set up Siebel Universal Application Network (UAN) center of excellence, which specialises in integrating Siebel software with other software packages.

The company is also planning to provide high-end BPO services such as application maintenance and support for enterprise application majors like SAP and Oracle. However, it does not propose to enter into the low end BPO offerings such as call centers.

"We have no plans to raise further venture funding and no immediate plans to go for a initial public offering in the US," Raju Reddy said.

Sierra received $17.4 million funding in 1999 from NEA, Walden International and GE Capital.