Birlasoft eyes micro verticals, cross-selling to reach $1bn mark

Pune: IT services provider Birlasoft is looking to grow by focusing on micro-verticals and upselling multiple services to customers, its top executive said, one year after it went through with a complex merger and demerger process with KPIT Technologies.

The past year was spent in stabilising the business and restructuring to become more vertical driven, CEO Dharmender Kapoor told ET. “We have about 200 clients to whom we sell only one service line. We will start cross-selling services and that will help with larger deals,” he said. A few months ago, the company signed a $240 million multi-year deal with medical devices firm Invacare, providing ‘IT-as-a-Service’ through an achievementbased agreement. Kapoor said that this was a result of its new approach to deals. If they had focused on only a single service offering, the deal would have been much smaller, a little over one-tenth the final deal size, he said.

At present, automobiles, consumer products and manufacturing form about 50% of its client mix, and going forward, it would focus on specific niches or micro-verticals within industries to grow business, Kapoor said. The $500 million CK Birla Group firm has targeted $1 billion in revenue in the next five years, and cross-selling services and micro-verticals will play a big role in getting to that mark. “We were focused on creating a new structure in the past year, and now that it is more stable, we can do more of these deals,” he said.