CDC Software set for inorganic growth in India

BANGALORE, INDIA: CDC Software, a wholly owned subsidiary of CDC Corporation and a provider of industry-specific enterprise software applications and business services is planning for inorganic growth in India.

The customer relationship management (CRM) major is presenting targeting four companies with a turnover of $20-$30 million for acquisition over the next year in the enterprise software space.

Talking to CIOL Bureau, Nagaraja Prakasam, managing director of CDC Software (India) said: "We are very excited over the Indian CRM market and are already evaluating four Indian companies in the enterprise software space for acquisition over the next year. Over the last two years the parent company has acquired eight companies mostly out of USA including Horizon, a US-based company with offices in Mumbai."

As per a recent IDC report, CRM market in India is presently a $40 million industry with about 8-10 major players including SAP, Oracle and is growing annually at 40 percent.

The company has announced the launch of Pivotal CRM sales in the Indian market through, CDC CRM Solutions. Now the company will exclusively sell and implement Pivotal CRM in the India market.

"We began operations in India mainly for R&D and now also expanding into sales and services," adds Prakasam. The company is planning to double its R&D team from 127 over the next two years. Presently, the Indian company has about 320 of the global 2,299 employees.

Shubho Bhattacharyya, chief executive officer of CDC CRM Software said: "We have also successfully completed our first sale of Pivotal CRM to TTK Services, a leading person-to-person outsourcing company. But we are not just focusing on the CRM market but also will foray into ERP and CDC Factory products in the next few months.”

Pivotal CRM is one of the most comprehensive enterprise CRM solutions in the market today and is widely deployed in the services industries where clearly differentiated customer experiences are critical to success. 

The Pivotal CRM solution covers the full spectrum of Customer Lifecycle Management that includes: sales, marketing, service automation, partner management, and analytics with access available over the Web, portal solutions, PDAs, smart phones, Blackberry devices and mobile phones.

Pivotal CRM provides comprehensive industry-specific functionality along with a very flexible architecture to quickly replicate unique business processes for a customer thereby drastically reducing deployment time and total cost of ownership. 

TTK Services is part of TTK Group, a 77-year-old diversified conglomerate.  TTK Services is a pioneer in the person-to-person outsourcing industry through two brands called, "YourManInIndia, a complete concierge service that manages tasks in India on behalf of their expatriate India clients and GetFriday, a virtual assistance service that helps clients worldwide with a variety of tasks such as research, web monitoring, making appointments and even providing wake-up calls.

Sunder Prakasham, chief operating officer, TTK Services Pvt. Ltd. said: "We have different business units targeting different clientele and each of them having a unique business process. The ability to adjust our service offering according to changing customer needs and the dynamic business environment will be a key competitive differentiator for the future. Our company is also focused on creating a knowledge base and improving the efficiency of our sales cycle. We selected Pivotal CRM because the system meets all of our criteria."

The company is also targeting financial institutions, insurance, mutual funds/asset management and corporate financial companies in India. Reports indicate that in the 2007 rankings for enterprise software companies, SAP leads with $12, 415 million turnover followed by Oracle and CDA CRM Solutions ranked No 12.