Kishore Kumar

HYDERABAD: Owing to an increase in business and the need to bolster its product delivery, software development provider Virtusa Corporation, is on a massive recruitment and expansion mode in India. 

Through this exercise the company plans to emerge as leaders in the financial and telecommunication domains.

“The general feeling in our company at the moment is that we are not sales constraint, but delivery constraint. We are able to sell ahead of our capacity right now. So the stress is on recruiting. A lot of recruitment is going on in India, particularly Chennai, where we have more capacity today for additional employees,” Marc Herbert, chief marketing officer of Virtusa told CyberMedia News.

Though the Chennai centre houses 400 employees it has the capacity to accommodate 800 more professionals. “We will see the fastest growth in company in Chennai over the next year,” hopes Hebert.

Hyderabad, where the company's other centre is located, engages 1300 employees. In the offing is the construction of a new campus at Gachibowli in the Andhra Pradesh capital. 

Spread over seven acres, the campus being planned will accommodate 5000 employees. Virtusa will invest $22 million for the construction of the campus. The Massachusetts-based firm acquired the land from Andhra Pradesh government last year.

“We are excited about the location where we are going to construct our new campus. It will do a lot to establish our image as a top company,” said Herbert.

The new campus in Hyderabad is expected to be completed by next year. “The planning is well underway. Initially we'll have one or two buildings. We'll consolidate the existing space before gradually moving to the new campus. That will be our India headquarters,” remarked Herbert.

Virtusa, which started functioning in 1996, has two basic segments: High tech unit, which develops products for software companies, and the general enterprise segment that focuses on Fortune 1000 firms. The centre in Chennai focuses more on the latter.

In the coming years Virtusa wants to further expedite its financial and telecommunication verticals. “Today the verticals that we are beginning to have competence are insurance, banking and brokerage within financial services and telecommunication. We believe that with these four industries we have a chance to become world leaders in information technology. We are in the early stages of building world-class protocol components,” informed Herbert.

“The combination of our competence in software products and custom applications gives us the ability to have skills second to none. Half of our revenue is focused on software vertical. In future we are going to use the software vertical as a platform for building the competence in other verticals.”

A lot of Virtusa's core management in Asia is located in Colombo and India is the nerve centre of activities. “Our scale is such that we cannot grow that fast in Sri Lanka as we can do in India. The supply of good engineers in Chennai and Hyderabad is much higher than in Colombo. These two cities will continue to be our focus area,'' said Herbert.

The high-quality expertise found in India is also a reason behind Virtusa's interest in the two southern cities. “The talent pool available in India is world class. The value for the money has always been superior from Indian engineers,'' explained Herbert.

“Even though there is a lot of competition that India is facing from countries that are trying to emulate the Indian model, it still maintains an advantage. And India is continuing to retain the advantage despite the fact that the costs are increasing faster here than most other countries. For a company like us, which is focusing much more on value creation than cost savings, this is the place to do it. It is possible to do world-class complex software development in India now that's not possible anywhere else. That's what makes India successful,'' added Herbert.

For the past three years Virtusa's growth rate has been 45 percent compounded per year. “The rest of the industry is growing at 20-25 percent range. We can sustain growth rate that are well in excess of the industry rate. So we are expecting fast growth in the coming years,'' said Herbert.

Virtusa has plans to acquire a two acres land for building a new campus in Colombo. Earlier this month, Global Service Magazine named Virtusa in the top 100 list of the world's most innovative service providers.

© CyberMedia News