BANGALORE, INDIA: From the consumption standpoint, Indian embedded market has great potential. However, the market is highly fragmented and is still in the early days, says Joseph Underwood, executive VP (USA), Mindteck (India) Ltd., provider of embedded systems software and IT services, during an interview with CIOL. Excerpts:

CIOL: How important is India, Mindteck's largest base outside the US, in the current scenario?

Joseph Underwood: Embedded space has finally started coming of age in India. There are several players who provide high quality embedded work from India. Mindteck is a leading player in this space and our embedded practice is more than a decade old. We are bullish about the embedded market and have an aggressive growth plan for this space, although we do not have any business focus in Indian domestic market.

From the consumption stand point, Indian market has great potential. However, the market is highly fragmented and is still in the early days. The US has a rather large and structured market. It is also a highly mature market and the growth can be linear in the coming years. During the next decade, we expect to see the India and China market are growing relatively faster compared to the rest of the world, due to cost and availability of talent.

Mindteck is headquartered and registered in India. Our India development centers are very critical to our business from the delivery standpoint. Our largest team is operating out of India and majority of key stake holders are from India. Considering the above factors, India is very important part of our business.

CIOL: What were the trends and demands that evolved during the past six-eight months in the Indian embedded space? Going forward what will be the trends and challenges in this space?

JU: Projects that are part of discretionary budget are generally put on hold. In many cases R&D budgets are slashed or frozen. Majority of our clients are doubly cautious about spend, resulting in extended sales cycle. However, there are a few industries which to some extent are recession agnostic and they seem to be doing relatively better.

Offshore vendors will have to deliver better ROI. Therefore, innovation will play a key role for process innovation and automation that help companies save costs in mid to long term and give them competitive edge. Vendors need to understand clients' business challenges a lot better to be able to provide meaningful services. Companies will need to build industry-specific niche technical skills as differentiators.

CIOL: What are the new developments at Mindteck and can you also share the company's India roadmap for 2009?

JU: At Mindteck, we took sometime to revisit our strategies and business goals and came up with better service offerings and engagement models. We are focusing on our existing relationships and offer to provide them our full-scale offerings, thus growing up in the value chain. We are also building technology-specific template-based solutions and framework solutions, specific to our targeted industry. These solutions will help our clients to cut down the development time and costs in many cases, thus gain long-term competitive advantage.

Besides embedded capabilities, over the last year, Mindteck has developed strong delivery capabilities in IT services and IT infrastructure/ managed services areas. We are experiencing significant growth in these areas and have invested on a new facility in Bangalore that is completely dedicated to IT infrastructure/ managed services related work.

CIOL: Did the recession force you to downsize business targets in the US? How is Mindteck helping recession-hit companies?

JU: Not really! In fact, we have an aggressive growth plan this year for the US market. Our first three quarters have been very good. We grew over 50 per cent on YoY basis. Our fourth quarter as well as annual result is expected by June 09.

Fortunately, we do not have any significant exposure to recession-prone industries, like BFSI and Automobile. However, we are not completely out of it. Therefore, we are re-strategizing our 'Go to Market' approach.

We now offer an outcome-based 'Collaborative Partnership Model' with a guarantee of better ROI on their investments. At Mindteck, we are focused at aligning our resources and investments with our clients' business goals and plan to build competencies specific to our clients' domains. This will help us build better credibility and long-term relationships with our clients.