Symphony plans captive centre buyout

Symphony Services, a provider of global outsourcing solutions, is in the final stages of acquiring a captive centre of a player in the embedded software development space.

The US-headquartered company, with a $100-million revenue run rate, is also planning to foray into the mobile computing area.

"A good chunk of our revenues comes from enterprise software development. We also operate in the storage and system software space. We have recently forayed into embedded software development, and are looking at expanding our presence in this area," Nagi Prabhu, vice-president, Symphony Services Corp (India) Private Limited, told Business Standard.

Symphony Services has participated in the development of 240 software products. Some of its 70-odd clients are Autodesk, Oracle, Yahoo! and Texas Instruments. "We are expecting to close in on a few more deals in the embedded software space," he added.

Incidentally, the company is witnessing an increasing number of clients outsourcing their product development to third parties in spite of having their captive centres in India.

"These companies have an issue with scalability. Getting the right manpower is of strategic importance in this sector, and filling the talent gap is one of the major reasons for them to outsource their work to third parties," Prabhu said.

On similar lines, such global players may also decide to sell their captive centres. Symphony Services is acquiring one such centre that operates in the embedded software space.

"The player no longer considers it feasible to run its centre here. So we are acquiring the centre and bagging the parent company as a client," Prabhu said.

Meanwhile, the company is also looking at expanding its client base in Europe. "A majority of our customers are from the US now," he added.

Symphony Services also plans to foray into the mobile computing space this year and hopes to crack some deals soon.

The company has an employee strength of around 3,300 in Bangalore, Pune and Mumbai. It plans to ramp up its headcount to 5,000 by the year-end.