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Persistent Systems

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DQI Bureau
New Update

Though contract manufacturing is a popular concept in the hard ware industry,

it is difficult to find its counterpart in the software sector. Coming closest

would be Pune-based Persistent Systems, the brainchild of Dr. Anand Deshpande,

an ex-member of the HP Labs in Palo Alto. This Rs 80 crore company, formed in

1990, provides complete lifecycle services for offshore software product

development by ISVs. "What this means is that we have product development

companies as customers, for whom we develop the products, though the

Intellectual Property is owned by these companies only," says Deshpande.

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Having positioned itself as an outsourced product development company,

Persistent is no longer just providing software components; it is doing the full

life cycle of the product. "We build a product, support and maintain it,

build new versions depending on the market feedback and now provide even

Intellectual Property to our customers as well. You can probably call us the

Flextronics of the software industry," Deshpande says.

Anand Deshpande

Not an idle boast, considering that just like Flextronics, Persistent too

works for clients of high pedigree like IBM, BEA Systems, Microsoft, HP, Intel,

Agilent, Symantec, Oracle, Openwave and Google. It counts even Indian companies

like Sonata, Symphony and Aztec amongst its customers. On sheer size, however,

Openwave, Agilent and IBM are three of Persistent's current top customers.

In recent times, Persistent has gone for some interesting diversification in

new domains. While in bioinformatics, the company is working on genome

sequencing with White Heal Labs in Broad Institute, MIT, life sciences involves

data management work for Siteman Cancer Research Institute in Washington.

In last one year, more than 700 people joined the company taking its total

count in six centers across Pune to 1280. Besides, it has around 85 people in

its newly opened Nagpur center. While this sort of substantial hiring is quite

unusual for a product company, Deshpande explains it to an increase in accounts

with ISV clients plus diversification in new areas. No wonder, he is predicting

revenues of Rs 138 crore and Rs 230 crore for Persistent in 2004-05 and 2005-06

respectively. 

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