firstRain to double its India ops

Pragati Simlote

NEW DELHI: Besides targeting a 300 per cent growth in revenue, market intelligence solution provider firstRain is planning to double its India operations by the end of this year.

Around two-thirds of firstRain's employees are stationed in India and the company currently has around 55 people involved in providing services and R&D in India. The company plans to double its headcount here by end 2006.

firstRain CEO Penny Herscher said, “We are looking at creating an opportunity in India for both engineers to develop software products and domain experts to provide their professional expertise across three key verticals - financial services, pharmaceutical and technology.”

firstRain Market Intelligence software is delivered as an on-demand application service involving three steps of finding the information on the web, analyzing the information and then packaging it and delivering it at the customer's desired frequency.

The Indian R&D team had developed the company's market intelligence software and is working on launching an enhanced version of the software soon.

The firstRain solution provides advantages like timely and better information, increased competitiveness and reduced time and manpower spent on manual searching, monitoring, organization and communication of information.

The solution is priced at $75,000 - 1,00,000 for a team of five — 10 people for one year.

“We solely focus on the US market as of now, but plan to move on to Europe — London and Switzerland by end 2006 and then to Asia,” Herscher added.

firstRain is a dual-national, venture-funded, privately held company headquartered in Foster City, CA. It was founded in 2000 and employs more than 90 people in Northern California, New York City, Boston, New Delhi and Mumbai.

Major customers of the company include Symbol Technologies, Sanofi-Aventis, JPMorgan Chase, Citicorp Credit Services, etc.