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Progress Software to double Indian investment

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CIOL Bureau
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Kishore Kumar

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HYDERABAD: Progress Software’s India development center is making rapid strides by contributing heavily to the company’s overall growth.

With almost every critical functions being carried out from the Hyderabad facility, the company, which provides application, service and data infrastructure softwares, is motivated to increase its investment here.

If the investment was $ 2 million in its initial year of operating independently, this year would see the Bedford-based company double its investment on Indian operation.

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Sesha Rao, general manager India Operations elaborates: "We want to leverage lot more than we have done so far from India. The plans are to increase the investment quite a bit. The investment last year was $ 2 million. This year we want to double it.’’

The company strengthened its Indian operation by launching its own office in April 2005. October saw the company move on to its permanent facility, housed on a 30,000 sq ft space, in the city’s IT hub. "We have grown our operation quite a bit now and ramp up has been good. We have increased our footprint in India in not just for sonic but also for other units. Today some of the most critical function of the company is being done in Hyderabad,’’ says Rao.

A significant part of the technologies are being developed in India. A major fraction of the OpenEdge tools are being developed in the center besides it also has its own charter in Sonic arena.

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Progress has about 80 professional in Hyderabad and plans to increase its headcount to 150 in less than a year.

Progress’ Indian sojourn started off with a partnership with Pramati. Progress outsourced some of its internal product development to Pramati. When the time was rife, it decided to go on its own. ``After a year or so we thought it’s the right strategy for us to start our increase our presence in India. Then we decided Indian operation. The best way to start was the critical mass we had with 20 engineers, who were working in our partnership with Pramati. It took a few weeks to transfer the operations and incorporate Progress India,’’ recalls Rao.

Inorganic growth has been an integral part of Progress’ strategy. Throwing some light on Progress’ series of acquisition Rao says, ``over a period we found that there is a lot more gap in the products which we need to address. This resulted us in acquiring various companies. The companies we acquire are primarily technology companies. We led those companies to work independently as far as possible to maximize the customer satisfaction and at the same time we kept on trying to integrate them to work with our core software OpenEdge.’’

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Rao, however, explains that the company’s acquisitions are more of technology driven and less of growth strategy.

"It’s unlikely that we would acquire companies in India unless there’s demand for technology,’’ says Rao.

According to Rao, Progress Software is structuring its product line. Its operating units are now transforming themselves into three different product lines. The structuring would see OpenEdge, DataDirect, Sonic Software, Progress Real Time would be seen as application, data infrastructure and services product lines. 

" The model is evolving slowly now into a product-based one,’’ says Rao.

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