MindTree gets aggressive in India

BANGALORE, INDIA: Bangalore-based information technology services company MindTree is now focusing on India Inc., posing challenge to the global players.

The company has garnered around 25 clients and is on a race to grab more from the leading pie in its journey to become a billion dollar company by 2014.

Speaking to CIOL, P.K. Gopalakrishnan, senior vice president and India business head, IT services at MindTree, said the company would be targeting more customers across the country.

“MindTree is an India-based company, but we focused on a few clients and did not spread into the market. We now plan to mark an impression in the country. Over the next 12-18 month, our focus would be towards building that imprint and targeting more customers across the country.”

The company recently bagged the Application Development Services (ADM) project from UIDAI, defeating many big timers. Under this, MindTree is expected to build application for feeding the data from various enrolling agencies or registrars.

Gopalakrishnan said, “The win is a true validation of our committed approach to the Indian market. This project was possible because of our technical expertise in application development.”

Apart from UIDAI, the company is working with other government agencies for application development and consulting like JNNURM, CSIR, and state government of Rajasthan. It is also participating in various tenders for the national and state e-governance projects. It recently, deployed a pilot of video analytics application (Mind Manage) for the traffic police in Bangalore. The company plans to take this forward to other traffic department in various cities too.

In the past one year the company added about 25 new customers and targets as its prospects the top 500 companies among the India Inc. With the expansion plans, MindTree expects to increase market revenues from India business. At present the Indian business accounts for 5-7 per cent of the total revenue.

“Having said that, we aim to become a billion dollar company by 2014, and we expect around ten per cent of that to come from India. MindTree will leverage its strengths in manufacturing, BFSI and travel and transportation segments and start actively focusing on government and energy segments,” Gopalakrishnan added.

Besides leveraging on the frameworks that have been developed in these verticals, it will look for client-specific solutions too.

Over the past couple of years, MindTree has been looking at developing economies for growth. A few months back it had announced to step up its efforts to leverage the growth of the Middle East IT services market. The company is definitely under the pressure of touching the billion dollar mark. The wish to reach there by 2011 got extended due to the unexpected slowdown.

“It would be unfair, if I say that the recession had not influenced the decision to look at the developing markets like India and Middle East,” agrees Gopalakrishnan. “But this is a natural step towards growth. India has been our homeland and we have a tremendous brand equity.”

MindTree has its stronghold in IT services, independent testing, knowledge services and product engineering, which comprises R&D services, software product engineering and next in wireless, and is looking at strengthening its capabilities in areas like infrastructure management.

Its intentions to challenge the global counterparts, comes out clearly with the fresh acquisition of 7Strata, a remote infrastructure management (RIM) services provider. Gopal believes that the acquisition completes the entire gamut of services offering and helps in positioning the company at a stronger level.

7Strata is a Chennai-based, privately held company that offers end-to-end, fully integrated, remote IT monitoring and management services. 7Strata began its operations in October 2007. The 7Strata team has developed a proprietary infrastructure management software platform to offer RIM services.

The ITIL-compliant platform helps customers save money and improve service levels by having an automated and integrated tool to manage IT operation processes.