Compuware increases India focus with partnerships

The ever growing and developing market, India is attracting attention from a lot of companies who are looking at increased investments in the region to tap the opportunity here. The fresh example of this is Detroit-headquartered Compuware.

Speaking to Akanksha Prasad of CIOL, Nick Evered, regional vice president, Asia and India, Compuware, shared about the opportunity and the plans as far as India is concerned.

You joined Compuware recently from Oracle. And your responsibilities mentioned was in Asia and India. What is the idea behind looking at India separately?

Yes, I joined Compuware recently from Oracle after spending 15 years there. India is well on a growth trajectory, promising lots of opportunities for companies. Our decision to look at India separately is a reflection of our new focus for the country as it is unique from other economies in the business and market behavior. India is a big market, but Compuware has a very low visibility in the country. Over next few years, we look at increasing our customer base in India, hence doubling our business here.

Over next few years we are looking at 10-15 per cent growth. Asia at present has a nominal share, but we expect to play a big role even in numbers. A few countries in Asia is very strong in computing and mobile space. While Philippines is strong in mobile computing ans mobile banking, India has entered into the revolution of banking and telecommunication. This is the right time to catch up with the growing trend.

What is the projected India roadmap for the next two-three years?

As part of this India-focused strategy, we are working towards doubling business in next few years. We would embark on increasing brand awareness among the enterprises, enhancing partnership with service partners and building up our internal team.

We are heavily investing in partnerships with service providers. We are partners with Wipro Infotech and Tata Telenet. Today, business applications are moving rapidly outside the corporate walls to the Internet. Our Application Performance Management (APM) solution gives you a full view into application performance and health. The APM has a significant component of service involved, which cannot be taken by a product company like Compuware. This is the opportunity for our partners to leverage upon.

What are the opportunities? Where do you see Compuware places against competitors?

We have a big focus around banking and financial sector. India is catching up fast with increasing online transactions. Better and hassle-free experience to the end-users is no more an IT issue, but a business issue. We at Compuware, ensure smooth transaction and end-user experience. Apart from the BFSI, we see opportunity in Governments, media entertainment and gaming sector.

Our offering are a must for both CIOs and the service providers. We work on two client fronts, the enterprise and the service providers. For the enterprise information officers, the new SLA will talk about the customer experience than just the number of tickets raised and solved. Similarly, service providers can tap their performance based on the value-added user experience and build their SLAs accordingly. Hence, the CIO would get more vision on the output and end-results.

Post the addition of Gomez and Vantage, the company has widened its portfolio and is now capable of providing end-to-end APM. It provides a top-to-bottom approach, monitoring application performance, from middleware, database, where the issues of end-users are looked into pro-actively. This is unlike the traditional scenario, where companies start with the bottom layers reaching the top, ignoring the entire bottlenecks faced by the end-users in the journey.

Around 2008, Compuware massively worked towards transformation, under Compuware 2.0. It included new market approach along with changes in the market logo. What’s the outcome of that?

Compuware 2.0 is not just a time-based marketing and branding strategy as perceived by the industry. It is long-term transformational exercise, and right now we are in the middle of the journey here. It's all about how we become five times of what we are right now. The result of this exercise is that we were named in the magic quadrant. And hopefully, with the recent addition of Vantage and Gomez, we would be placed as leader in the next magic quadrant report. We enjoy a good share of APM in the industry.