Calliduscloud to invest $6 mn in India

BANGALORE, INDIA: Calliduscloud, a US-based cloud software company, will invest $6 million in India. The company, which launched its first offshore development centre in Hyderabad today, is hopeful of doubling the investment in one year.

"We are making a $6 million dollar investment and expect it to grow substantially. By next year, we expect the investment to go up to $10-12 million," said Michael Graves, senior vice president, Engineering and chief technology officer, CallidusCloud, over a call with CIOL.

"We are seeing huge growth in terms of adoption of cloud services in Asia and Europe. In the past it was usually the smaller companies that started with cloud. However, in the last couple of years we are seeing that even large enterprises are adopting cloud. We are seeing growing traction in India with respect to cloud computing," he added.

The Hyderabad development center is a 15,000 square foot facility that can accommodate 140 cloud software professionals.

It will deliver operations, engineering and support services to its customers in the region and across the world. The company also has an office in Bangalore, opened about three years ago, that houses 80 professionals. The company is targeting telecommunications, banking and insurance segments for its products.

"Any large enterprise with large number of sales people, transaction volume etc is our target segment. For these verticals we have a suite of cloud solutions that help them in hiring, learning, sales, and marketing. India is becoming more important for us, of late. In the past 12 months we have added a couple of important customers, such as Tata etc."

About 85 per cent of the company's total 1,600 customers are from North America, which also accounts for 85 per cent of its total revenue. The company reported a revenue of $84 million in 2011.

"We are relatively a small company. So the biggest challenge is to spread awareness of our solutions from which the market can benefit. Fifteen per cent of our total revenue comes from Asia and India. From India we have only a handful of customers, such as Tata Communications, Idea Cellular and ING Vysya Inusurance. We hope to grow substantially in the coming years, and especially with the new investment we expect the revenue share to double," he added.

Calliduscloud competes with the likes of Oracle, SAP, Accenture and Wipro etc.

"Even though we compete with larger companies, we have a much larger customer base for the products that we sell," he added.