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Global Reach
analysis for the financial services, telecommunications, health care, and government sectors.
Among its India clients are HDFC Bank, Indian Overseas Bank, Tata Consultancy Services, the
Bombay Stock Exchange, the Center of Railway Information Systems (CRIS), and AIRCEL.
Drawn by India’s global IT vendors and huge developer community, Sybase has expanded its
capabilities in ancillary areas such as disaster recovery, business analytics, and middleware to extend
traditional customer relations, sales force automation, and enterprise resource planning
functions to mobile and wireless devices.
A Sybase subsidiary, iAnywhere, holds more than 70% of the mobile database market. Another
subsidiary, Sybase 365, offers short message service (SMS) interoperability and distribution of
mobile content. Among its uses:
• Utility customers of Eastern Power Distribution Company of AP Ltd. (EPDCL) in
Andhra Pradesh access billing information, billing and disconnection alerts, and advance
notices of power shutdowns through their mobile phones.
• Users of Just Dial Services, a telephone search provider, can type in a code and access
hotel, restaurant, shopping, entertainment, and other information by reply text message
across 40 cities in India.
For the small and mid-sized business market, Sybase has offered its database product, including
development tools, in Linux format since 1998. Using Redington India as its national distributor,
Sybase also has a network of value-added resellers (VARs) in major cities. It markets off-theshelf
products to new customers through its VARs and bundled solutions to existing ones via
third-party system integrators.
Autodesk, the San Rafael maker of computer-aided design (CAD) software, entered
the Indian market in the mid-1990s through a sales/distribution arrangement with Tech
Pacific. In 1999, it established a wholly-owned India subsidiary, Autodesk India Pvt. Ltd.,
with three divisions—sales and marketing, developer consulting, and software development.
But it was not until 2003, in a depressed post-tech bubble economy and facing difficulties finding
domestic or foreign engineering talent, that the company took a hard look at India. Autodesk vice
president of global engineering and platform engineering Gary Lang says he and two of the firm’s
other top technologists visited India that year, scouting locations for a captive R&D center that
would take over work outsourced at the time to its third party vendor, Symphony.
Pune offered lower overall costs, a traditional manufacturing focus (which was appealing because
people could be found there who understood mechanical design), lower attrition and less poaching
of trained staff by competitors than was typical in Banglore and Hyderabad, as well as a high concentration
of developers expert in CAD. “We saw a building in Pune that had just been built by
one of our competitors, that was capable of housing a thousand people,” Lang recalls. “That got
our attention.”
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