Zensar Technologies on Tuesday joined hands with internet giant Google to provide Google Apps to large retail and manufacturing customers. Zensar considers the market for collaborative applications to be the next big wave and expects Rs 200 crore of new business to be driven by this alliance in the next 12-15 months. Business Line caught up with the Dr Ganesh Natarajan , Vice-Chairman and CEO of Zensar Technologies, to discuss the scope of the partnership. Excerpts:

What role will Zensar play in this alliance?

We started off with applications development and application maintenance and moved towards enterprise applications, working with vendors like Oracle, SAP and Microsoft. In the last three years, we found that most of our clients were looking at cloud, social media and mobility as areas where they wanted to extend their applications. So far, we have been doing that with Oracle and Microsoft.

We talked to Google and found that the Google Apps suite — ranging from e-learning applications, geospatial applications to core enterprise applications — was very compelling. So, as partners to Google now, we will implement Google technologies ourselves. Also, we have identified manufacturing, retail and distribution sectors in APAC and are looking at how we can work with them, build solutions that will help these customers to ‘go Google'.

Can you put a number to the business this alliance will create?

For us, over Rs 200 crore of new business in the next 12-15 months will be driven by this alliance.

Why this partnership, when user organisations can implement Google Apps on their own?

People need to be trained in collaborative applications. This combines a consulting, implementation and change-management role. So we see a lot of potential for the alliance in India, Australia and Singapore. Eventually, we will also look at West Asia. Asia is the centre of gravity for the world and the opportunity to scale new applications in this part of the world is going to be more than the US or the UK. That is why we are starting here.

What softwares are you building on Google Apps for manufacturers and retailers?

We are already working on exchanges for manufacturing companies. It is a collaborative exchange between the ecosystem of customers, dealers, suppliers and automobile companies to ensure that everyone has access to the same information. Similarly in retail, there are huge procurement activities. So procurement using the same platform is a huge opportunity.

How is the global demand for technology and services panning out? Do you see a choppy year ahead given the macro-uncertainties?

We have given a guidance of Rs 1,600-crore revenue for this year. We did Rs 408 crore in the second quarter, so clearly we will exceed our guidance. Hence, the market is not a problem. Even within Europe, we do not see the UK, Germany or Holland as a problem. And we do not do work in Italy, Spain and some of the affected markets. So, the year 2012 is not an issue in terms of getting enough orders to build our revenues. The year 2013 is difficult to predict. It really depends on how elections play out in the US, how West Asia revives from whole Arab spring movement, and, of course, the Europe situation.

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW