Posted by The Economic Times, April 30, 2008

CHENNAI-BASED software services company Photon Infotech is planning to set up a shop in the IT capital of India. Operating out of a 60,000-sqft facility on OMR and a 40,000-sqft facility at Guduvancheri (both in Chennai) with 1,300 people, Photon Infotech is now planning to expand to Bangalore. Starting with an incubation space of about 10,000 sqft, Photon will scale it up to 40,000 sqft as the requirement goes up.

“The key people who will manage the operations there are on board. We will have 250 people in place by the time the centre is ready for operations in Bangalore,” Photon COO (India operations) Prakash Gurumoorthy told ET.

“We have signed a letter of intent with a developer in Bangalore for an SEZ facility on the outer ring road,” he said. It plans to invest $5 million on the new development centre, which will be operational by June or July this year.

The company services over 500 US companies ranging from large enterprises to SMEs (which incidentally form half of Photon’s clients) in sectors like education, financial services, healthcare and retail.

“From a delivery perspective, there won’t be much difference in the work done there and here. Bangalore will be an extension of our Chennai centre,” Mr Gurumoorthy said. But, it is setting up a facility in Bangalore because of the talent pool available there. Photon’s revenues have grown from about $20,000 in 2003 to over $25 million for the year ended March 2008. It is looking to double its turnover this year, and expects $20 million to come from the Bangalore facility.

From helping customers with SOA consulting, implementations in .Net and J2EE space and projects with open source technologies in the US, Photon now wants a share of the Indian online pie. “We will partner with Indian companies to manage their online business,” Mr Gurumoorthy said. “We will work on break-even till our work results in revenue growth for our clients,” he adds. The company has got one client in the online brokerage space and is close to signing up with another one in the online books domain.

It has also set up Photon Innovation Labs at its OMR centre. “While with our online business we aim at creating technology requirements based our client’s goals, the Innovation Labs will focus on product development in the online tech space and will be IP protected,” Mr Gurumoorthy added.