"We prefer to be conservative"

BANGALORE: Touted as the third most profitable company in the world, the California based Serena Software, an enterprise application life-cycle management software provider, has launched its India operations with the setting up of a sales and support services center in Bangalore. Serena's regional Vice President, David Parker recounts to Latha Chandradeep of CIOL, the company's India strategy and the challenges faced in aiming for the top slot in the global application life-cycle management market.

We have been beating Rational consistently. We are at 22 percent post the acquisition of Merant, which has broadened our solution offering-from mainframes to client/server. We have been growing at over 25 percent compared to the worldwide market growth of 4.6 percent. In Asia, our growth is 30 percent. We are confident of overtaking Rational Software by end of 2005. We will be No.1 in the marketplace.

The one sure way that we will get there is by delivering superior products and superior implementation. Though Rational leads the market, we have more users than all competition-in the number of user licenses, we lead the market. Also, Serena is the third most profitable software company in the world and it is important that we maintain our profitability, while going for growth. We have $200 million in cash assets on revenue of $230 million. We will make significant investments in the market place but we are not for the big bang approach at all. We would prefer to be conservative and prefer to maintain our profitability.

I will sound biased, but we do believe that there is tremendous potential in all of Asia-Japan, Korea, China, India, Singapore. Currently, North America constitutes 60 percent of our revenue with the rest is coming from overseas markets. We expect Asia to be the next big thing, contributing significantly to the overseas market revenue.

We are not solely into traditional software configuration management space, which is what Rational and Borland primarily focuses on. Our products and solutions help companies manage change throughout the application lifecycle, which helps companies to efficiently manage the business critical applications that run their businesses.

We experienced a barrier while entering India, due to our lack of presence here. As far as India goes, my gut feel is that we have an untapped market here. There is a lot of dissatisfaction with the market leader. We hope to get 10 percent of the estimated $42 million market in India by end 2005. We will operate in India through direct and indirect models. We also expect more than 50 percent of the revenues to come from partners in India.