Satyam expands Africa business

By Leon Engelbrecht, ITWeb senior writer

Johannesburg, 19 Mar 2008

Satyam Computer Services has expanded its African footprint by signing up business in Mauritius and Botswana. The company has also opened a Cape office, says country manager Chittaranjan Jena.

Satyam is one of India's top IT companies and has aggressively moved into the South African market in the last two years. The company doubled its South African revenue last year and is set to report similar growth this year.

In Botswana, Jena says, the company is implementing a portal and content solution for the government. "Our main focus there is government and we are short-listed for a few other large enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementations," he says.

"In Mauritius, we have a fairly large presence with clients like Air Mauritius, the state bank and the revenue authority," Jena adds. "We also implemented the government online project there and we have a strategic tie-up with Mauritius State Informatics to jointly execute projects and skills development."

Cape regional manager Rudra Shatapathy says his office has done brisk business since opening last year. Satyam, he notes, is doing well in the insurance and oil industries. He says many Cape companies "are not properly serviced". Vendors are largely Gauteng-based and logistics are expensive as technicians expect to be flown down to the Cape and accommodated at the clients' expense for the duration of the work, he explains.

In addition, many Cape manufacturers use JD Edwards (JDE) ERP software, which is particularly poorly supported in the Peninsula. Shatapathy says this presented Satyam with an excellent opportunity that it has vigorously exploited - and the company's Cape headcount is already over 50.

"We are giving them comfort that we are here and have a local presence," he adds.

Satyam is also helping Cape-based insurers such as Santam and Old Mutual. "They are sitting with huge legacy mainframe systems," he says. "The challenge is to move them to product-based systems based on .Net."

The company is also doing business with oil giants BP, Chevron and Engen and supporting Shell's JDE ERP.

Satyam is developing a human resources (HR) recruiting tool for the Coega Development Corporation (CDC) at the Ngquru Industrial Development Zone, near Port Elizabeth. The solution will help investors find staff and help them with general HR administration and payroll. It will also allow the CDC and other government agencies to monitor black economic empowerment and affirmative action.

"The system will be owned by the CDC," says Shatapathy. "They are investing money in it and will make money on it. They see it as an investment and it will generate a return for them," he adds, saying the software is, therefore, different from the usual HR package which is a straight-forward business expense.

In January, Satyam's Singapore-based VP for the Asia, Pacific, India, the Middle East and Africa, Virender Aggarwal, said the company was working in 15 other African countries and had just set up a sales operation in Kenya.

He also announced the company had then already crossed the 100-employee threshold in SA, adding the figure excluded local trainees undergoing postgraduate training in India.

"Satyam continues to commit to local skills-building. In the last three months, another 45 local graduates have been taken in for the 12-month skills-development programme," Aggarwal said.

The company was also "evaluating the idea of setting up a near-shore delivery centre to service some of [our] large clients".