« Maheshwari Group setting up two malls in Hyderabad | Home | 10 Best Technology Companies To Work For »
Kenexa Opens $10m Software Development Center In Vizag
Posted by Srini Uppala | May 22, 2008 | 3,833 views
(16 votes, average: 3.56 out of 5)
Loading ...
Photo courtesy of Kenexa
Kenexa Corp., an American firm that specializes in helping other companies attract and retain employees, has expanded its footprint in India with the recent opening of a new $10 million software-development center in the eastern Indian port city of Visakhapatnam.
The 140,000-square-foot facility, which opened for business Feb. 11, is located about 400 miles to the east of Hyderabad, where Kenexa’s Indian subsidiary, Kenexa Technologies Pvt. Ltd, is headquartered. The Pennsylvania-based company has designated the operation a regional hub for research and development, according to Kenexa chief executive officer Rudy Karsan.
We intend for the [Visakhapatnam] campus to become a key part of Kenexa’s software global research and development organization,” Karsan said. “The campus is state of the art, environmentally friendly and conducive to creativity and invention.”
Situated on 25 acres in the Visakhapatnam Special Economic Zone, the gleaming, multi-level structure holds approximately 110,000 square feet of finished office space and an underground parking garage. In contrast, the four existing offices that Kenexa maintains in Hyderabad comprise only 32,000 square feet. The Visakhapatnam campus opened with a crew of about 50 workers – many of whom transferred from Hyderabad – but the company expects that figure to eventually surpass 200.
Matt McKelvey, vice president of Kenexa’s India operations, said approximately 150 employees have agreed to transfer from Hyderabad, which he attributed to a combination of incentives offered by Kenexa and Visakhapatnam’s quality of life.
We moved approximately 50 employees to [Visakhapatnam] and the balance will be coming over within the next seven months,” he said. “We put together a pretty attractive package of incentives for those workers who are interested in relocating to [Visakhapatnam], but at the same time, we found that many of them wanted to move here because it is a very desirable city.”
Commonly referred to as Vizag, the city of 6.5 million people is located on India’s eastern shore, nestled among the Eastern Ghats (a discontinuous range of mountains that runs parallel to the Bay of Bengal). Visakhapatnam is primarily an industrial port city, and as such, is home to several state-owned heavy industries and one of the most advanced steel plants in the country. It also boasts one of India’s largest ports and its oldest shipyard.
The sweeping economic reforms adopted by the Indian government in the 1990s brought modest growth to the city, but nothing like that seen in Hyderabad, which experienced an economic transformation and is now regarded as a hotbed for the IT, IT-enabled services, pharmaceuticals, and entertainment industries.
However, Visakhapatnam has worked hard to shed its industrial image, and the effort appears to have paid off. The city has emerged in recent years as an attractive destination for high-tech and financial-services companies – various national and international IT and banking giants have established or plan to set up offices there, including Satyam Computer Services Ltd., Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., HSBC Holdings plc, Cognizant Financial Solutions, Oracle Corp., Accenture Ltd., Infosys Technologies Ltd. and IBM Corp. In 2007 alone, Visakhapatnam’s IT industry grew by more than 100 percent, contributing millions of dollars to the local economy.
The city owes much of this economic growth to an abundance of highly educated and skilled workers, many of whom speak good English. This factored into Kenexa’s decision to build a new research and development facility in the city, McKelvey said.
What we find in Vizag is a city on the cusp of becoming a major player in the [business-process-outsourcing] and IT industries,” he said. “There are no fewer than five major colleges and universities there, which gives us a good base from which we can hire fresh faces and train them about the products and services that Kenexa offers, and the jobs that we’re asking them to do.
At the same time, we’ve found that many companies are coming to Vizag because of the city’s quality of life – people are interested in working here because housing costs are lower, things move at a slower pace and the city is situated in a beautiful location on the Bay of Bengal,” McKelvey added.
Kenexa has experienced rapid growth of its own in recent years.
The company, which was founded in 1987 as TalentPoint Inc., has registered sales growth of at least 60 percent each of the last three years, and 2008 revenues are forecast to hit somewhere between $221 million and $227 million, an increase of about 24 percent.
Kenexa’s products and services include an applicant-tracking system that automates and streamlines the recruiting process, and testing and assessment technology, which gauges candidates on their skills, aptitude, personality and experience, thus ensuring that the most-qualified individuals are considered for the position. The company also provides employee-performance-management solutions that enable organizations to automate career tracking activities, designs and administers employee surveys, and implements mentoring programs.
We work with over 2,000 clients globally, more than 70 of which are Fortune 500 companies, and we have a renewal rate that runs in the mid-90-percent range,” McKelvey said. “Our customers run the gamut from health care, technology, energy, retail and food services.”
Kenexa currently employs about 1,400 people at dozens of locations in North America, Europe and Asia; the company maintains its home office in Wayne, just outside of Philadelphia, and has regional headquarters in London and Hyderabad. However, the new office in Visakhapatnam will play a prominent role in Kenexa’s Asia Pacific operations in the coming years.
We see Vizag becoming our largest operation in Asia, and one of our global-service-delivery centers for the region,” McKelvey said. “It will continue to serve as a hub of research and development for our software products, but we also expect that it will take on more regional-specific work in the years ahead.”
SOURCES:
Indus Business Journal
Topics: Job Matters, SEZ, Information Technology |
Comments
You must be logged in to post a comment.