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News | | Symphony Teleca targets $500-million sales by 2014

Symphony Teleca targets $500-million sales by 2014

Technology services company Symphony Teleca expects to close $100-million buyout to reach its 2014 revenue target of $500-million, chief executive Sanjay Dhawan said.

Symphony, whose order bookings in the second quarter of the current calendar were its biggest yet, expects to grow faster than the industry, at about 20% annually till 2014, Dhawan added.

The company, formed out of a marriage between Symphony Services and Teleca earlier this year, will try to ride on strong demand for product development services centered around cloud and mobility with incremental growth coming from the US market – principally software vendors and device makers.

Symphony, which specialised in outsourced product development, counts Microsoft, Intel, Ericsson and Google among its customers. The California-headquartered company with revenues of about $300-plus million is promoted by billionaire Romesh Wadhwani-led private equity firm Symphony Technology Group.

Demand for outsourced product development is growing at a healthy clip with Forrester pegging the market size at $15 billion by 2016, growing every year at about 29%. Symphony’s competitor Persistent Systems too expects demand to stay strong and is chasing two to four big deals in the current fiscal.

Proliferation of cloud, mobile and social media technologies, the importance of mining customer data and the urgent need to focus on core business markets to tackle competition is driving demand for offshore software product development. Global product development offshoring grew 12% in 2011 over 2010, twice as fast as technology spend growth, Nasscom figures show.

“But it is becoming increasingly fragmented and specialised, and your margins really depend on where in the food chain you are,” Dhawan points out.

Symphony’s strategic push over the next couple years will be to stay focused on its core businesses of enterprise mobility and data analytics. The firm has carried out some realignment by offloading its telecom expense management business to Tangoe for about $41 million a few months ago.