The Venture Intelligence Blog

Startupcentral has an interview with Alok Mittal of Canaan Partners on the $45 million first round funding led by his firm for Wipro veteran and Mindtree Co-founder Ashok Soota's new IT Services venture. What do you find interesting about the business model? The business model draw for us (Canaan) was the outsourcing play. We already have a couple of portfolio companies (iYogi and UnitedLex) in that area. As far as the software services sector is concerned, in the past, significant shifts in information technology spends have created space for new companies. There is a shift taking place now in terms of enterprises in the US and Europe adopting cloud and mobility-based solutions. We think Happiest Minds has the potential to grab a large slice of this market. Will they work closely with some of your India and global portfolio companies which are in the same area? Absolutely. In fact, the founders have been very diligent about walking through both our and Intel Capital’s portfolio c...

In the context of the recent acquisition of Capital Markets focused IT Services firm Headstrong by BPO giant Genpact, former Infy sales head Basab Pradhan, has an interesting post suggesting that the answer is yes. Genpact had to bulk up its IT Services business. IT Services offers both higher margin and higher growth. Both of which Genpact has not been able to deliver, at least to the satisfaction of investors whose expectations are benchmarked to the early days of the IT Services industry. ...A few months back I had written about Cognizant’s rumored interest in Genpact. Eventually, nothing came of it. But I thought that that would have been a very good combination. Sort of a dream team – the fastest growing services company and the best BPO company. ...This is a good time for bankers in the Offshore services industry. More transactions are to be expected. Watch this space. Arun Natarajan is the Founder & CEO of Venture Intelligence, the leading provider of data and analysis on ...

In the wake of IT Product companies like Xerox and Dell buying their way into the IT Services world through multi-billion dollar deals, Reuters - quoting industry analysts - has an article that lists significantly India-based companies like Cognizant, WNS, ExlServices among the list of "attractive acquisition candidates". (Other companies on the list include Sapient, CSC and Amdocs.) Possible acquirers could be tech giants such as IBM , Hewlett-Packard or Cisco, European players like BT or Deutsche Telekom and Asian companies like Hitachi , Fujitsu or NEC, analysts said. "There's definitely going to be some strategic acquisitions -- there's no doubt about that," Goldman Sachs analyst Julio Quinteros said. "It's just, how much are you willing to pay? And would you rather wait for the market to come back a little bit?" The recurring revenue stream that IT services firms have gives them more visibility and stability. ... One group of services fi...