CDC sees India as a profit-making center

MUMBAI, INDIA: While global businesses look at India as a cost-cutting center, CDC Software CEO Peter Yip disagrees on this idea and says, “We see India as a profit making center and not as cost cutting center.”

Talking of advantages in doing business in India, Peter says that, in India, to sell software products and solutions, you need people right from the pre-sales and marketing to technical staffs for solution implementation and trained professionals. “And India has a large supply pools for professionals for software business compared to other countries.”

Comparing India with North America, where the company's head quarter is based, Peter says that he is more optimistic about India because about 75 per cent of the company's global research and development (R&D) happens in Bangalore.

“Apart from top management and decision makers, majority of innovations related to software products and solutions such as software product life cycle, programming and project management are done here,” he adds.

About the company's business strategy, Peter explains that the company is vertical driven and so it is about 2-3 steps ahead of SAP and Oracle, as it is better focused and functional in those verticals.

“Also we focus on small and medium businesses (SMBs) and we tap emerging countries and market like India and China, where we work partners. And in past 2 year we have been quiet successful in India,” Peter stresses.

Globally, the enterprise software applications and services company operates in 50 plus countries with a total 1200 employees, while in India it has about 230 staffs - majority of them are involved in R&D. “We plan to hire more staff this year and want to increase staff strength by 15 per cent,” informs Nagaraja Prakasam CDC Software's managing director, South and South East Asia (SSEA).

According to Nagaraja, the India R&D team has broken its own record by raising the R&D related work by one per cent that takes up to 76 per cent this year. He points out that in the last 7-8 years, CDC has maintained a healthy growth rate of 25 per cent annually and stresses that even during the down-turn, it has sustained the same growth rates.

Indian insurance companies such as Bharti AXA, CIBIL and Max New York Life Insurance are CDC Software's customers, who largely use the Pivotal CRM solution.

Recently, the company had announced a strategic partnership with eBizNET Solutions by investing in the company to offer its software products and solutions on 'cloud'.

Peter considers that cloud computing would be a change of paradigm for CDC Software and comments, “As we are small (company) compared to SAP, Oracle and others we have more chance of moving faster ahead and could beat them. However success for cloud computing companies would only be determined by critical mass.”