Keeping pace with the rapidly growing domestic IT services market, mid-size software firm Zensar Technologies aims revenues upto 40% from the Indian SME segment in the next two years, said Ganesh Natarajan, chief executive officer at the company. At present, 80% of the company?s domestic revenues come from large corporations, including a small share of medium enterprises. The engineering, automotive and the manufacturing sector is expected to drive the growth in the SME segment.
?There are 20,000 to 30,000 companies that we can target in the SME sector by offering specific solutions. Within the next one year, we are looking forward to tap at least 2,000 to 2,500 companies,? Natarajan said. The company recently partnered with Microsoft to offer a specific solution to this segment. Zensar?s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Solution is powered by Microsoft?s Dynamics ERP, which is a solution from Microsoft for mid-sized organizations.
Zensar has outlined a road map for a capex of Rs 2 crore to be invested in SME sector in a year. ?But more important is the training of around 50 consultants for this. The training would include implementation on the ground?both technical and functional ? involving all the senior people. We will develop a full team to do this work that will initially offer services in India. And then we could take it to other geographies like China, Malaysia or Bangkok,? added Natarajan.
Though the government sector is the biggest segment to focus in the domestic market and currently gives the company 18% domestic revenues, Natarajan believes that mid-size companies like Zensar have to be very choosy and avoid government projects with a long gestation period. ?For instance, we have a bid in place with the Assam government for the last 15 months. They want a fully connected education system and it is a Rs 30-crore project,? he said.
Natrajan said that in these challenging times, cloud computing will be a boon for SMEs. This is because small companies have a constant pressure to adopt technology because of changing customer requirements. Zensar?s solution for SMEs will cost as low as Rs 15,000 per month. This would have completely no capital investment or investment to employ people for these small companies with low budget. ?I think this will be a bigger market, even than the large companies, as the large firms will soon face a saturation in terms of what they buy and implement,? he stressed.
Even a recent study by Indian software body Nasscom reports that while the Indian IT-BPO exports are projected to grow by 13% to 15%, the domestic IT-BPO will grow slightly more, by 15% to 17% in 2011 fiscal. This growth would be driven primarily by small & medium enterprises. In the bigger picture, Zensar plans to draw Rs 2,000 crore revenue globally in the next three years. It would also double its India revenues to Rs 100 crore by 2011 as against Rs 50-55 crore domestic revenue currently.