Bengaluru-based IT services firm Sonata Software has been looking to reboot growth in its flagship international services business. In April this year, the company appointed Samir Dhir as its new chief executive officer to drive this growth. Dhir talks about the company’s growth strategy, near-shore centres, and M&A strategy, in an interview with Ayushman Baruah. Excerpts:
What is Sonata’s growth strategy going forward?
As we move forward, the focus is to get newer and bigger enterprise-grade logos. The way we will do this is by focusing on verticals and micro verticals that lend themselves to that. We are going to focus on dividend retail, specialty retail, BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance) and HLS (healthcare and life sciences). The second dimension is that we are doubling down from a partner ecosystem perspective beyond Microsoft to other players like AWS, Snowflake and ServiceNow. The third part of the strategy is from a geographic perspective. We are calling out the US and the UK markets predominantly as the key focus areas going forward. And beyond that, we will focus on the Nordics, Singapore and Australia.
What is the reason behind setting up more near-shore centres like the one in Ireland you just announced?
First, let me explain the need for it. As you modernise your customer, you do that in an agile way because the playbook for modernisation is not really defined from a customer’s perspective. They do not know what they really want, so we work with them collaboratively to work the transformation agenda out. To do that, you really need a global model, but in a very collaborative face-to-face manner. Unless you have a near-shore presence with these customers, your collaboration model breaks. The second side of the equation is talent. We believe we can tap into good quality talent from these geographies.
Also Read: Sonata Software signs pact with Ireland firm
What is your mergers and acquisitions strategy going forward?
I think the core part of our strategy is that we want to focus on newer verticals like micro verticals, build partnerships, focus on geographies and build talent globally. If we find a property which intersects several of the four elements I just described to you, it will be of interest to us. We are not going to do an acquisition for scale. We are very clear about it. We will be judicious about our investments. We are looking to do acquisitions which complement our strategy going forward.
What are your hiring plans for the next few quarters?
We aspire to double the company’s revenue in the international services business in the next four years. We made it very clear that we are very confident we can get there. We will be in the higher end of the growth trajectory of the industry. We want to be the top quartile performer and we will continue to hire in that light. This year, while many of our competition have pulled back the campus offers, we have not pulled back.
Given macroeconomic uncertainties, do you see a cut in client spends or slowdown in decision making?
We have not seen any slowdown from our customers at this point in time. We have seen some delays related to discretionary spends, but not in any significant manner. We have also seen a very clear trend that as long as we are modernising their platforms and those are revenue generating for our customers, the budgets are actually higher.