Exterro to double headcount in India

Exterro, a US-based $12 million privately held legal enterprise software company is looking to double its headcount in India and triple
its revenue in 2010. The company headed by an Indian-born US citizen has set up a development centre here.

"We are planning to book space in the upcoming Tidel Park in Coimbatore to house around 250 to 300 employees. In the first phase, we will expand our operations here by doubling the head count to 90 in 2010," Exterro’s president & CEO Bobby Balachandran told ET.

The company started in 2004 at Portland, Oregon in US by four Indian-born promoters with an investment of $1.5 million is looking to finance its expansion plans through private equity and venture capital. "We are in process of infusing around $15 million to increase revenue by three times in 2010. We will go for an IPO by the end of 2012," he added.

Exterro has two offices, one each in Portland and Chicago and a third one in Coimbatore. Mr Bobby said the Coimbatore centre is treated as an extended arm of the US offices and not as a separate offshore development centre. "India is strategic for our growth and we chose to set base in Coimbatore due to the city’s entrepreneurial nature and huge talent available," he added.

It is currently focused on product development with four unique products namely Genome (data mapping), Legal Hold (preservation of data), Discovery Workflow Management (process data) and FusionGo (snapshot of everything). They are priced in the range of $ 250,000 to $ 150,000 and the company charges 20% on a yearly basis as maintenance cost.

"We are looking to innovate and develop two additional products a year in the electronic discovery platform, whose market is currently pegged at $4.5-$5.5 billion a year," Mr Bobby said, adding software with limited functionality will be launched in the Software as a Service (SaaS) mode from February 2010 for companies in the low and mid market ranges.

"We are doing business in the enterprise software space but we see a growing market in SaaS mode and we expect it to eclipse the enterprise software space by 2012," he said.

Basically a link provider between business and technology, Exterro has specialised in software solutions pertaining to legal governance, risk and compliance management.

"The executives in the West are under lot of regulatory pressure and they need to store, preserve and process data regularly. We help them with our software in managing data for legal enterprise," Mr Bobby added.

Walt Disney, Visa, Pfizer, Hershey’s, Fidelity, Qualcomm, Microsoft, Oracle and Intel are its clients, he said, adding the company is also in discussion with Mittal group and Reliance in the US. Apart from US, the company has set its sights on European Union and is scouting for office space in London. "Asian countries including India are also in our plans, but corporate governance and market regulations are still not mature here," he added.