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Sierra Atlantic on a mission to carve the best out of OPD

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CIOL Bureau
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Sierra Atlantic, which has its Global Development Center in Hyderabad, is on a mission to carve the best out of Outsourced Product Development, Manufacturing and the BFSI verticals. Sarath Sura, managing director of Sierra Atlantic explains the company’s focus area to Kishore Kumar of CyberMedia News. Excerpts:

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What kind of growth strategy is Sierra Atlantic adopting? 

In terms of the growth strategy, verticalization is becoming very critical for us. We are structuring our organization in terms of the verticals. Verticalization is basically when we talk to our customers and we understand their businesses, how IT is helping their businesses, how it can help their customers and their customer satisfaction. Earlier it was slightly on lower level. We used to provide help on tactical issues. From a tactical service provider we are now becoming more of a strategic service provider. This means that our team includes people who have that kind of work experience in the industry as well as IT professional who have become a part of our organization. This is really helping us. Now the customer is viewing us more of a strategic provider to help grow their business. This is a nice way to grow up the relationship.

Last year you acquired a company in the US. Is there any other acquisition in the offing?



We are continuously looking at small acquisitions. We look at acquisitions to help us fill up the geographical need, vertical need and the technology need. There are several small companies having specialized operations that are unable to compete with big companies. The plan is to take a quick advantage and build on it. Also for these small companies it’s more of a good strategy to partner with us. 

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Which are the strong markets for you right now?

We want to make sure that we have a strong geographical presence. The US has been traditionally big geography for us. We are concentrating heavily on the European market now. If you look at most of our manufacturing our businesses, many of our customers have operations in the US and Europe. So US and Europe are strong big market for us. Asia Pacific looks promising in terms of manufacturing business. We are having offices in each of the zones and we want to strengthen our presence in these areas. The offices we have are mostly sales which slowly become part deliver centers where they will have consultants.

What is your company’s India plans?

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We have not been so active in India. We serve to clients in the US and Europe who have operations in India. But clearly, Indian market is now growing significantly. We have started looking into developing our Indian business. We are looking at two things. One is roll out for all our international customers and also look at some large clients here in the manufacturing and OPD space. The strategy will be the same that we use for the international market. It’s still under planning.

Which are the key verticals for you?

The key vertical for us right now is one the Outsourced Product Development (OPD) that is the software vertical where our clients are software companies who are looking at helping their operations to be more effective. And the second vertical we have is the manufacturing. Several of our customers are in the manufacturing space. Third is BFSI, which is a new vertical for us. Everything else we call it rest. In terms of business 35 per cent of business is coming from OPD, about 40 from manufacturing and seven per cent from the BFSI vertical. The rest accounts for 18 per cent. We have been working in each of these verticals for several years. We expect BFSI to become slightly bigger and reducing the other verticals.

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What do you expect out of the OPD vertical?

OPD became glamorous and more understood in the last two years. There is a huge opportunity in this space. We have been working with some large companies, some mid sized and several start-ups. OPD is a fairly specialized activity. In the OPD space there are few companies who have specialization. If you look at OPD, we have been there for the last 9-10 year, which is almost since the inception. Definitely we are one of the established company. We expect a 40 percent growth YoY in this industry. The momentum in this space has picked up. Given that the momentum has picked and the fact that we are established with a solid base of customers, we feel that we can do well in this space. We would like to be on top three in this space. I think we have everything to reach there.

How big is your reserve?

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We raised our funds five years back and we are cash positive now. We don’t need any funding right now.

What kind of products do you have?

These products are related to business process integration. Our partners tell us some gap areas in their product portfolio, which they don’t want to develop. We identify those gap areas with our customers. The clear need is identified in collaboration with our partners. We don’t sell it. These are all sold on partner’s price list. These products are niche, small areas. They are not very complex products.

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