Marlabs India rolls out big plans

MUMBAI, INDIA: Marlabs India, a wholly owned subsidiary of Marlabs Inc, US, is looking for a multi-fold growth in India. It wants to increase its global business revenue share from 20 per cent to 50 per cent in coming years.

“Primarily, if you look at the global business mix it is presently around 80:20 where the India unit contributes 20 per cent to the overall business revenues,” said Vignesh Hebbar, Marlabs India’s vice president & head of Operations.

“However, moving forward we want to increase the revenue share to 50 per cent, which will align with our $250 million global revenue target by 2015,” Hebbar added. Overall, Marlabs Inc. has reported 34 per cent annual growth with $120 million revenue for the fiscal 2009-10.

Largely, the company is focused on the mid market segment in the BFSI, education, airlines and logistics verticals. BFSI contributes 45 per cent revenue while education along with airlines and logistics share 10 per cent revenues each and the rest comes from utility, retail and pharma sectors.

Though majority customers are based in the US, North America and Canada, the company is looking to tap opportunities in Asia Pacific, Middle East, Europe and India. Presently, it has less than 5 per cent customers in India but wants to increase it.

“We want to tap Indian IT services market, but the local market is very much fragmented. So we are building up technology and service capabilities in the cloud, mobility and information security space,” said Aravind Sankaran, Marlabs Software’s director of Global Marketing.

“Our mantra is to be close to our customers and offer them cost arbitrage. Unlike other vendors, we want to be strategic partners to customers and offer a blend of offshore and onshore service capabilities,” Sankaran added.

According to Hebbar, the company has three global delivery service centers in Bangalore, Pune and Mysore.

“We are expanding our delivery capabilities to meet the demands of APAC, Middle East and other regions. We are having delivery centers in India, Kuala Lumpur and other locations so that we can offer options to customers in terms of delivering services,” he said.

“We already have procured land to build our second delivery center in Bangalore by 2013. And we want to increase our staff strength to 3,000 in the next fours years,” Hebbar said.

About the demand outlook in current sluggish economic scenario, Sankaran said that the demand pipeline looks a bit flat as the discretionary spend will remain low. However, spend on information security is expected to be higher in next few years, particularly the BFSI segment.