US IT firm eyes India for optimizing business

Tuesday, 08 June 2004, 19:30 IST
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BANGALORE: Mercury Interactive Corporation, the US-based firm in business technology optimisation (BTO), has set its sights on India for cashing in on the outsourcing boom and the growing domestic IT market. Unveiling its BTO strategy for India, the $506 million Nasdaq-listed firm announced here Monday the setting up of its Indian subsidiary for marketing its products and services to domestic and overseas vendors and customers. "Mercury has about 100-strong client base in India, deploying BTO initiatives for measuring and maximising business value across IT to ensure critical applications, meet quality, performance and set goals," said Mercury Chief Marketing Officer Christopher Lochhead. "As a leading software firm with our own testing tools and suite of products for optimisation, we improve quality and performance of applications and manage IT costs, risks and compliance. "With CEOs facing intense pressure to maximize the business value of IT, adoption of BTO strategies will reduce the cost of application overheads by 10-20 percent annually. "Such savings also provide enough funds for investment by firms in new technologies to improve productivity and quality," he stated. Though the Indian IT industry has witnessed dramatic growth over a decade, thanks to the inherent cost advantage and wealth of talent pool, even its leading vendors face intense competition from their rivals due to decreasing tech budgets and emphasis on return on investment. "Indian enterprises need to optimise the business value of IT while managing cost to have the competitive advantage," he said. India's economic growth has been driven by the application development industry and globally outsourced IT operations. With IT outsourcing set to grow exponentially, the BTO market in India is poised to catch up with the enterprise resource planning and the customer relationship management market in the next two to three years. According to country manager T. Srinivasan, Indian outsourcing firms are under pressure from the US and European vendors to strike a balance between cost and quality. "These outsourcing firms will benefit from our automated tools that are used to check the quality of software in operation or prior to implementation. The game plan is to shift from cost advantage to adding business value to IT spending," he said. In the $2.5 billion BTO market that is growing at about 20 percent annually, Mercury commands about 50 percent global market share. Incidentally, the company has posted 45 percent growth in the Asia-Pacific region, which has emerged as the fastest growing zone.
Source: IANS
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