Pragati Simlote

What are the strategic areas for CMC?
There are four strategic areas for CMC. Infrastructure management has always been a core competency of the organization and with remote infrastructure management becoming popular, we have already started providing this as a service. We are synergizing with TCS to provide this service to multinational customers in India and global customers.

We have already been providing things like data center management, business continuity management. In the solutions and services space, we want to go aggressively in providing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). There are also lot of replicable solutions in specific verticals like our transportation solution, our solutions for ports and shipping industry, general insurance, stock exchanges, mining, etc.

The Third area is of embedded systems. Because of the hardware-software background that our engineers have, we have very strong capabilities in this area and this has been one of our fastest growing practices within CMC. We are now serving several multinationals clients-leading telecom companies, process control companies in the US and semiconductor companies like Xilinx. We expect to grow in this space even faster. The fourth strategic area is of digitization services. We are not only good in BPO related to document and work flow management but we have also developed special expertise in the entire scanning, image processing work flow management area. Cheque truncation is another big opportunity that we are looking at.

What is CMC's strategy post privatization?
We are now moving into high-end value added services and solutions space. While CMC was part of the GOI, we did a lot of work for the government, which were pioneering solutions. These solutions have enormous global potential. So after the privatization and becoming part of TCS, we are able to now promote and support these solutions and services on a global basis.

What kind of revenue growth are you looking at?
For the year 2004-2005, our total revenue was Rs 782.5 crore. We have been transforming as an organization- from an equipment provider to service provider. We have primarily been operating in the Indian market. So our margins have been traditionally lower. But we see India as a growing market. We plan to grow aggressively. Going forward, we want to focus on verticals such as Pharma for RFID and retail point of sales such as Internet kiosks, etc.