Sudhakar Pennam
CEO, Cigniti Technologies Ltd
“Our goal is to eliminate the knowledge gap and reduce school dropout rates by creating infrastructures in the entire country,” says Sudhakar Pennam. In Conversation with Kartik Sharma.
According to IDC India, over a period of five years (2012- 2017), local IT services market will grow at a CAGR of 13.8 percent. How do you see Indian market for your company in the coming years?
Enterprises and service providers will make huge investments in areas like cloud, mobility, Big Data across verticals like BFSI, Healthcare, Retail, Telecom, Manufacturing and Education. A recent Gartner study shows that the Indian financial services companies alone will spend 42,000 crores on IT products and services and there will be a 13 percent increase as compared to 2012. The investments are in business critical applications where quality of software matters. Cigniti is well positioned to help Indian organizations improve business outcomes by assuring software quality. Cigniti has proven capabilities in testing applications across verticals like BFSI, Telecom, Retail and Healthcare. Currently revenues from India are less than five percent of our global revenues. However, we expect this to grow to about eight percent of our revenues over the next two years. We are seeing huge traction in the Indian IT market from enterprises, product companies and global corporations active in India.
Today Cigniti is regarded as India’s largest and world’s 3rd largest independent software testing services company. Where do you see the company few years from now?
We are listed on the BSE and have been growing at above industry growth rates consistently over the last few years. We are providing significant value to our shareholders. We aim to become the world’s largest independent testing services company within the next three years through a combination of organic and inorganic growth. This will take our headcount from 800 to more than 2500 over the next three years. A majority of this work force will be from our Global delivery centres in Hyderabad. We aim to be the most preferred employer for every career tester in India.
Apart from the aggressive organic growth plans, what strategy are you making in the selected areas of focus which complement your capabilities as an organisation?
Our executive management team members are industry recognised thought leaders. They share the wealth of knowledge by speaking out in leading forums like NASSCOM, STeP-In, STAR Conferences, etc. We are also working with leading engineering colleges, finishing schools and institutes to improve the readiness and to help the students become world class software testing professionals. Cigniti has also undertaken various CSR activities through which we aim to impact more than one million lives through education. The goal is to eliminate the knowledge gap and reduce school dropout rates caused by lack of infrastructure and quality teaching. By translating and creating freely available videos into Telugu, this project aims to help more than 60 Lakh students in Andhra Pradesh. Currently the initiative is to produce, translate videos for Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry and Biology topics covered for classes V to X in the school syllabus. Cigniti is also working with NGOs to provide government school children with tablets with pre-loaded content. This will improve the quality of education and help lakhs of students stay in school.
What is your company’s go to market strategy for Indian market?
Our go to market strategy for India has a three pronged approach. Firstly, we offer our specialised capabilities in areas like Performance Testing, Security Testing, Big Data testing and Mobile Testing. We are at the forefront in areas like Big Data testing, Mobile Testing and Security Testing which are emerging as big opportunities as an outcome of the increasing complexity of applications deployed by Indian enterprises. We are Partnering with tool vendors to offer unique solutions like automation migration and optimisation. Cigniti’s products like RoboQuick are being used by Indian enterprises for test automation migration. Lead with IP led testing services with tools that address gaps in commercial tools and speed up testing for our clients. As part of this strategy, we continue to invest in Cigniti Smart Tools.
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