Ken Kinsella, chief operating officer (COO) of Divine India, which operates in the extended enterprise area, talks to Punita Jasrotia about the need for the extended enterprise in today’s environment and Divine’s aggressive strategy for the Indian market

Could you elaborate on your extended enterprise offerings?
Extended Enterprise refers to the deployment of technology to an enterprise through interaction, collaboration and knowledge solutions. However, what has taken place is the evolution in a series of concentric circles, starting out with the back-office, expanding to the human resources function and the out-to-the-sales force. For this, the company has identified three core areas of activities: Professional services (consisting of enterprise solutions from systems integration to digital brand behaviour across a broad spectrum of leading technologies); software services (focus on customer interaction, content management, knowledge management and collaboration management technologies that extend systems beyond the edge of the enterprise) and the managed services (build, host, manage, monitor and secure an enterprise’s critical applications, assuring high availability and a single-point accountability.)

You recently tied up with Satyam, Spanco and Global Respondez. What is your partnership strategy?
Partners are the growth engine for Divine; a critical component of our strategy to capture the Indian market. With Satyam, the partnership is to design, implement and manage solutions for content management. This will help customers to extend their business systems beyond the edge of enterprises throughout the value chain.Satyam’s global reach as a systems integrator, plus its offshore presence in India, offers customers an opportunity to deploy Divine’s content management solutions.

The company has also tied up with Spanco Tele Systems and Solutions, a leading IT services provider to design, implement and manage solutions for their Customer Interaction Management Telephony Portfolio including Conversations and XChange predictive dialling solutions.

Another tie-up has been with Global Respondez. The customer has an advantage since it allows one to place the dialling engine in US (where we are calling), while the database server is in India. This feature is particularly beneficial when we work with multiple customers, each wanting control of the predictive dialling platform.

How important is India for Divine?
India is on the top of the list in our business strategies, it being our only development centre in Asia. We have invested close to $10 million in the development of the Indian operations and plan to pump in another $10 million by the next year. Besides this, the manpower capacity would also be increased from the present 125 professionals to 250 by the end of the year. We are expecting a figure of close to $5 million from our product sales by the end of this financial year and a sustainable growth of 30-40 percent in the coming years.

Divine India has marketing offices in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. The services provided by Divine India include among others custom software development for Web-based and e-commerce applications, customisation, and maintenance. Besides this, the Indian operations also market and provide technical support.

Three years and 20,000 customers down the line, what is Divine’s game plan both for the Indian and the APAC region?
I believe the reason for this growth is a proactive and quality-oriented approach by the top management. Traditionally, we have followed the acquisition route. Being a cash-rich company, the focus is to build on expertise and offer the best to our clients. Over the past 12 months, we have expanded our operations significantly around the globe and will continue to look at overseas markets for future growth and opportunities. Given the tremendous opportunities for IT-enabled services in India and the growing awareness and acceptance for customer-driven technology solutions, we are sure of our success in the Indian market.

For the APAC region, the focus is more on establishing a good channel network. Presently Asia has a base of 60 strong channel partners. Besides this, there also are plans to expand and spruce up our regional training centre