BearingPoint set to enter City

BearingPoint set to enter City
The Times of India

Bangalore: Beat the infrastructure blues, another MNC is all set to enter Bangalore in a big way. BearingPoint, formerly KPMG Consulting, a is setting up Offshore Development Centre in Bangalore. The centre is likely to come up by Febraury 2006.

To start with, the full-fledged ODC will have over 600 developers, but is expected to be scaled up to over 1,500 by March 2007. Sources said the company may hire a higher number.

Sources said, it is crucial for BearingPoint to have a sizeable presence in the city, considering the fact that many of its rivals — Accenture, Cap Gemini and IBM — are here. With this, the city will have all the Big four. EDS is the other player conspicuous by its absence.

Operating from a business centre, BearingPoint currently has 60 people in the city, while it has 80 people in its Chennai unit. Sources said the company has plans to reduce its presence in Chennai and may close down its third party ODC there.

It has also outsourced part of its work to Covansys Corporation, a USbased global consulting and technology services firm in Chennai. Around 100 employees are working at Covansys on its account. “Once BearingPoint sets up its own ODC, its highly unlikely that it would continue working with Covansys. The level of working together will anyway change. The company is under severe pressure from its customers, plus it also has an increased focus on single service delivery, which means less or no subcontracting for better margins,’’ sources said. Covansys has been supporting BearingPoint in various projects with ERP planning, maintenance and development. In the initial stage, Covansys’ connection has helped the company to get an address in the country, added the source.

BearingPoint is currently busy scouting for ERP\CRM applications, application engineering, maintenance and testing talent in Bangalore. Sources say that a small portion of the new recruits will be posted in Chennai till certain ongoing projects are completed. Later they will be moved to Bangalore.

When BearingPoint set up its global development centre in Chennai a couple of years ago, it had said that it would have 2,000 dedicated employees in the next two years. “However, the company has failed to scale up its people front primarily because market dynamics were unfavourable. The expansion of Indian operations were sort of frozen due to revenue erosions and layoffs that happened in the company globally,’’ the sources added.