Building Expertise in Specialized Technology Offerings Date:   Monday , April 04, 2011 Founded in ‘98, Prithvi Info Solutions is rapidly growing IT services provider with specialized focus on telecom engineering and services. The company went public in 2005 and today has emerged to be a $400 million multinational information and communications technology company. In a candid interview with SmartTechie, Nitin Vyakarnam, AVP - Global Marketing and Aliances, Prithvi Information Solutions, talks about the current market scenario, challenges and new areas of opportunities mid sized companies. Where do you see the next big opportunity in India? Indian IT industry is an exciting place to be and can be categorized in 2 parts: e-governance and private sector. In the govt. sector there is tremendous traction, especially in the IMS space. At Prithvi, we are building three data centers in India for Haryana, Nagaland and Maharashtra governments for their respective e-governance initiatives. How is the U.S. market post recession? We see spending rebounding. The IT spend by companies has increased. In both India and U.S. there has been emergence and adoption of new technologies, the prime being Business Intelligence. Cloud computing and business process management is other areas of opportunity. Telecom engineering services is one of the major offerings for this market and hence the U.S. and Brazil is important and we are working on lot of new technologies like long term evolution, 3G, Wi-Max and more. How do you stay ahead of competition? Every mid sized company in India is a competition to each other. For us it is the specialized services where we bring an edge. For example, in analytics, we are one of the first companies to start an R&D division six ears ago. Prithvi as a services company has a R&D division where we have do researches solving customer problems. The R&D division churns out lots of solutions, many of which have converted to expert business solutions. This has become a big differentiator in terms of the quality of services we can offer in these specialized areas. We can beat the best in the world in these areas. Today, our clientele includes Fortune 50 companies across verticals like Telecom, BFSI, Retail and Healthcare. What are the challenges? Though spending amongst clients is increasing but the challenge we see is in the margin pressure. We see customers in the U.S. wanting to do variety of services but at a lower rate. This is the problem that small and mid size companies in India are grappling with today. The top five IT/ITeS players can handle this but the mid sized companies will have to improvise to handle the demands. We feel that developing expertise in niche areas like analytics and mobility services will help us increase our margins. Next is the ability to bring a differentiation to the customer’s plate as compared to the competition which we have fairly done successfully. What are the future plans? We hope to become the pre-eminent provider in India for telecom engineering services, in terms of maintaining and running networks for companies. The same will be the case in India, Brazil, Canada, U.S. and other countries. We also see that Cloud and SI as a service line would start to play a much bigger role in the way emerging markets go forward. In next five years we would see these areas pushing and becoming a larger pie of the revenue.