The Hindu Business Line : We can do IT better than captive centres: Symphony

SYMPHONY Services Corp (India) has said that it is trying to get companies with in-house software development activities in India to outsource the work to it.

According to Mr Ajay Kale, President, SSC India, Symphony was in talks with top management in companies that had tentatively moved their software design and development work offshore to India with 50-200 strong teams.

Mr Gordon Brooks, the newly appointed CEO, said that an internal study by Symphony found that pure captive offshore centres do not reach cost and productivity parity with offshore services until they scale to about 1,000 staff.

Further, they were lower on productivity, time to market and more expensive, he added.

Symphony Services is planning a campus for about 4,000 persons in Bangalore and plans to start another campus in an unspecified Indian city."Our existing and potential customers are increasingly finding the Symphony model more productive and less expensive,'' he said. "Last year, 95 per cent of l software companies we surveyed said they would be operating offshore by 2006 and that they would be moving about 70 per cent of their operations offshore.''

Ernst & Young was in the process of validating Symphony's study and numbers, he said. The company plans to double its headcount during the year to 2,000. It is also in talks with a few specialist third party service providers in India for acquisitions.

Mr Brooks said that the company would take its global operating centre model into newer business areas.