iGate to invest $25mn for more facilities

The CEO of iGate Global Solutions Phaneesh Murthy after some heavy duty

restructuring of the company, involving a number of acquisitions, takes on the

challenge of seamless consolidation. In a chat with Nandita Singh of CyberMedia

News, he talks about infrastructure ramping up and a gamut of activities to help

grow the business.

On the company’s restructuring plans?



We have completed the capital restructuring in concept, as to what and how

we want to restructure. Most of the efforts are also through, except for a few

which are pending on account of court convened, shareholders’ approval and

other regulations. For the next couple of quarters we will be concentrating on

integration, consolidating and building as seamlessly as possible. We are

ramping up our infrastructure. A 65,000sft facility has gone operational in

Hyderabad. We have plans to invest another $25 million across three locations—Bangalore,

Hyderabad and Chennai–in the next 15-18 months. The investment will be in

technology and ensuring a global standard in operations.

On the intellectual property at iGate?



IP at iGate is not based on the idea, but the execution of the idea the

technology and process frameworks used and the way they are used constitutes our

IP. We have acquired a considerable amount of IP such as pH Matrix to determine

process investment strategy through an analytical model. We have created real

time visibility dashboard for our customers to track the progress of the

outsourced work in the backend office in India.

Phaneesh Murthy

As a small company we need to show value to our customers in helping then

become virtual corporations. We are putting out internal systems and controls in

order and are investing in Six Sigma training. We are putting 500 iGators on

training for Six Sigma green belt. We are taking large business processes such

as order through remittance and re-engineering them to reduce the DSO.

What would be the growth drivers for the company?



Business services provisioning is a clear differentiator for us, and

financial services is the vertical we are focusing on. US and Europe are high

growth markets for iGate. I cannot make projections on the revenues or the

growth rate, as the political uncertainty is making deal sizes swing. The

question is not whether to outsource or not but that how much of outsourcing

will minimize risk. It is going back and forth making it difficult to make any

predictions.

How many clients are in the pipeline?



We have a reasonably good client pipeline. We re-engineered our sales team

in last quarter and with an all-new team on board results will be visible in

June 2004. We are looking forward to June.