Primavera bullish on Indian market

Primavera Systems Inc., an independent provider of collaborative project, resource and portfolio management solutions, is confident about growing further in India with this recent infrastructure development boom. David Oates, vice-president, Primavera, International Sales, shares his views on the Indian market with Pragati Simlote of CyberMedia News in an exclusive interview. Excerpts:

What kind of solutions do you provide?

We are a project and portfolio management software company. There are three pieces to successful project management (PM) implementation — people, process and technology. We provide technology solutions for managing a set of projects.

For bulk of projects, at the 20 percent completion point it can be seen as to whether they would be successful or not. Using a tool like Primavera companies can predict at that point where their failure points are, their risks points are and how they can mitigate those risks as well as giving resource planning, risk analysis, etc.

Why is the company bullish on the Indian market?

India is experiencing an infrastructure boom. The contribution of infrastructure is 6.2-6.3 percent of India's GDP, which in percentage terms is quite comparable to China. There is a great parallel between the current scenario in India and China around three-five years back. At that time there was a complete lack of process in China. But with time China has embraced PM methodologies to deliver large infrastructure management projects on time and on budget.

We have identified Indian market as one of our three — four key areas of growth. Because of similarity with China - same economic growth and same infrastructure spend in terms of GDP, India is at a stage where there is immense infrastructure growth without a huge amount of process behind it. This leads to projects not being delivered on time and budget. We would like to change that with the help of our solutions.

How has PM as a discipline changed overtime?

In the past PM has been a tool for the technical guys — the project planners. The roles used to be quite limited. But today the stakeholders are too many. So within organizations who are doing this project, the users or people interested in project information are not only the project managers but also include finance, marketing, consultants, etc. The roles have broadened. We provide a platform, which allows large infrastructure companies who may be owners of the infrastructure, or engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) companies like BHEL, etc. They need to have tools which let them manage these projects from the automation perspective — conceiving the projects properly, optimizing the cost estimates, quantifying the risks associated with large project, knowledge captured in these projects, etc.

Repeated use of this knowledge is also important to learn from the experiences and fine-tune cost estimates and plans.

What kind of growth are you expecting in India?

India is expected to be our second fastest growing market after China and probably at par with china in terms of percentage growth. The international revenue (apart from the US) for Primavera from India has more than doubled in the last two years. International business is 40 percent of the total primavera business and contributed $110 million in the year 2005. India contributes around five percent of the international revenue for Primavera.

What about competition?

Our real competition is with Microsoft Project (which is a great product) but it is a standalone project and not an enterprise wide solution. Our enterprise wide solution gives visibility and control of all your projects and not just one or two.

When we talk about enterprise project management we do not talk about one or two projects, but of multiple stakeholders, which include people outside the company also. Our solution can also handle multiple projects of different nature.

What kind of selling and pricing model do you follow?

Primavera sells products through a network of partners worldwide apart from the US, UK and some of the major corporations in Europe. Need local people to understand local people and in PM it is very much true.

The company follows a role based pricing and role based marketing model. We have only a couple of core products but we have broken them into roles. This means that a CEO will have access to different parts of the solution as opposed to say a planner or a contractor. People with specific needs can be addressed with this.

What is your relationship with KLG Systel?

KLG is our partner in India and is doing a great work in implementing and educating people. Our partnership with KLG is growing over the last 11 years. In India, we have seen a significant growth in terms of revenue and education level. Globally, we have 40,000 customers, with close to 500 customers in India.

We have experience of working on many big infrastructure projects, which gives us huge infrastructure knowledge and experience and we are counting on KLG's help on delivering infrastructure projects better.