The Hindu Business Line : CA hopes to double biz every two years

Hyderabad, Aug. 26 IT management software company CA is upbeat on India and plans to double its business within two years, its President and Chief Executive Officer, Mr John Swainson, said.

In an interaction with Business Line, Mr Swainson spoke of how India Technology Centre located at Hyderabad has emerged as a strategic product development hub and high end technology support provider for operations globally. Excerpts from interaction.

What is your mission in India?

The idea is to spend some time with colleagues in India centre and interact with partners such as Satyam, Infosys, Wipro among others. India centre is the largest technology development centre for CA and its contributions have grown in whole range of areas. It is gratifying to see how the R&D team here has transitioned into handling the entire product development work.

Given such success, we expect to handle more work on product development.

How about IP creation and how many product patents have you filed from here?

Already teams here are playing big role in the entire CA product development strategy. It would not be right to single out one product.

We have already secured a couple of patents and many are in the filing process. It takes a while to secure them. The work here spans user interface, complex systems design, security and other areas including mobile technology.

They now handle the entire product development work including testing and thereby have ownership to these products.

Will the slowdown impact tech spending?

It is generally difficult to predict technology trends and spend as they keep changing.

However, when there is slowdown, enterprises and their Chief Information Officers (CIOs) spend more on technology to bring in greater efficiencies.

While some sectors in the US such as housing, automotive and financial services are hit, they are looking at innovating using technology.

Therefore, the role of CIOs too is changing as they are assuming the mandate to drive business plans.

How do you view the opportunities in India and emerging markets?

When you talk about India, it is not right to describe it as emerging market. Being a rapidly growing economy, enterprises are looking at improving their IT processes, compliance and build securities around their systems.

In all these areas CA plays a major role. Therefore, we will have a hybrid implementation model of either directly or through partners and systems integrators.

We believe licence sales here will grow at much faster pace as in Brazil and we need to do lot more in China and Russia.

Businesses want IT to define their strategy and therefore, they continue to invest to stay competitive.

Do you see your business mix changing?

About 50 per cent of business comes from the US and the rest from outside. This was about 60:40 few years ago.

We believe more business will come from BRIC countries, including India.