The Hindu Business Line : Demand analytics: Symphony to scale up infrastructure

THE anticipated need for demand analytics services has prompted Symphony Services Corporation to invest $30 million on scaling up its infrastructure and human resources.

About 25 per cent of new hires are to be in the demand analytics space. While this year would see the headcount increase to 2,000 software professionals from the existing 1300 people, plans are on to add 4,000 people by end 2005 once the new facility located on a five-acre area is completed early next year.

"Currently market research BPO has mum-on-pop outfits (some 250 people set-ups) trying to bag multi-million dollar deals and US firms are not too comfortable outsourcing work to such firms. We operate on a GOC (global operations centre) concept wherein we are able to offer economies of scale and ability to ramp up rapidly on demand. We expect demand analytics to be our fastest growing business," explained Mr Ajay Kela, President, India, Symphony Services.

Currently the software firm has 15 GOCs dedicated to its commercial software group and one for the demand analytics practice dedicated to the multi-million dollar client with 400 people on board.

Demand analytics is high-end BPO work including data collection, cleansing, categorisation, management and modelling. Of the $3.5-billion addressable market targeted by Symphony, approximately $1.7 billion comprises the demand analytics market.

Having already signed a $50-million deal for a three-year period, Symphony expects to win more such deals going ahead. "We are likely to clinch six deals in the $30-million range by early next year and are in advanced stages of negotiations with some of them. Given such volume of business we need to scale up on infrastructure and manpower to address this," Mr Kela said. The US-headquartered Symphony has invested $60-70 million in its Indian operations till date with a commitment to invest $100 million over the next three to five years.

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