USi to increase Indian presence

Priya Padmanabhan

BANGALORE: USinternetworking Inc (USi), a software company that was in the news recently when AT&T bought it over for $300 million, is planning to increase its headcount at its Bangalore and Hyderabad offices, as well as acquire more companies.

The company hopes increase its existing headcount from 200 to around 270 at these locations and intends to have 50 per cent of its overall global workforce in India in the coming years.

USi is also looking to acquire companies that have delivery centers in India.

The company specializes in managed enterprise solutions, application outsourcing, remote management and security and risk management services. Besides India, USi has offices in Maryland, Colorado and Illinois in the US.

Speaking to CyberMedia News, Andrew A Stern, chairman and CEO, USi, said that its enterprise hosting and managed services business was attractive to AT&T since it wants to move up the value stack by offering managed services on top of its networks.

“Their enterprise business is increasingly getting commoditized and so they wanted our services which could be a value addition. For USi, the merger would allow a bigger sales and marketing footprint since we can take our current services to the AT&T customer base.”

Stern said that the trend of enterprises outsourcing their system management is on the increase since these companies prefer to focus on their core capabilities rather than direct their efforts in managing IT.

“Large businesses are recognizing that aspects such as managing finances and procurement are core to their business and not IT.” He also added that these companies cannot afford the expertise and budgets to manage applications themselves and instead prefer outsourcing it to service providers.

Some of USi’s competitors include Oracle’s On-demand division, IBM, Accenture and Ariba.

The company offers on-demand services on its Pinnacle platform that is partly based on grid computing.

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