It is not just about numbers and charts,” claims Anand Deshpande as he flaunts a list of customers he has acquired over a period of time. His customers include some of the biggest names in the software product industry.

The suave founder-chairman and managing director of Persistent Systems proudly says that his customers brought him fame and a place to be amongst the top IT companies in India. Among the frontrunners of the Outsourced Software Product Development companies, Deloitte Consulting rated Persistent Systems as the 11th fastest growing company in India in 2004; Persistent has customers ranging from Fortune 500 companies to startups. “We have a right balance that helps us create esoteric stuff and that is our value proposition,” Deshpande says.

With the ever-evolving nature of programming, the outsourcing of software product development has evolved more rapidly than other areas of outsourcing, giving Persistent Systems all the more reasons to smile.

Explaining its forte, Deshpande animatedly gets down to a breakdown of the nature of product development. Terming it as understanding the requirements and building solutions that can be improved and enhanced over subsequent versions and that it will be better than the previous one, he added that unlike a typical IT outsourcing project, where a set of well defined requirements working under the constrains of time and money would be the order of the day, product development poses a different challenge with time and money preceding the required codes.

The creation of a code for any product needs to ensure that the code is scalable enough to adapt to subsequent versions of the product as well. A product’s life is thus based on the quality of the codes created. The implication being that one would have to be futuristic about the next version while creating the initial code and ensuring its efficiency. The code has to beat the time and money constrains in addition to having the engineers focusing on what exactly is likely to be needed in the next version of the product and the versions thereafter.