Concerto to set up office in Mumbai

BANGALORE: Massachusetts based Concerto Software, provider of Customer Interaction Management (CIM) tools for enterprises and call centers, will open a Mumbai sales and support office in the first quarter of 2004. This will be its third such office following New Delhi and Bangalore.

"The office will function apart from our help desk, which is run by Wipro Spectramind, in the same city. We will also be finalizing on a location for our dedicated Concerto-run support center by February 2004. It will start operations in the second quarter of the same year," said Concerto Software APAC and Middle East VP, Pramod Ratwani.

He added that the center, which will do development and complex product support apart from the tier I support provided by the helpdesk now, will employ more than 60 people to begin with, a majority of who will be dedicated to development activities. He also reaffirmed the company's plans to invest $5 million in the country over a period.

"APAC contributes 25 percent of our revenues at the moment and India gives 40 percent of APAC revenues. India is the biggest market for us after North America," said Ratwani.
The company had recently announced a merger agreement, valued at $145 million, with Melita Software, a provider of solutions for maximizing contact center effectiveness. According to Ratwani, the proposed merger of the companies, which is being financed by Golden Gate Capital and Oak Investments, will not have a great impact on the sales and marketing activities of Concerto in the country.

"80 percent of our revenues in India is brought in by channels. We operate through three major distributors including Wipro and GTL and a similar number of system integrators including IBM. We will look to add to our Tier I base of channels in the next year. We would be especially scouting for people who have a good base in the Middle East as we will be handling operations there out of India," he said.

Though stating that the completion of the merger might bring its own set of channel partners to assuage its present need, he refused to comment on other aspects of the merger including the number of people that might be laid off. He did add that though Concerto's soon to be launched support center will mean shifting of certain job functions from its base in the US and this shift will mean some people will be asked to leave.

(CyberMedia News Service)