India is a growing defence market

Israel-based IT services & solutions firm Ness Technologies is betting on the Indian defence market and government sector which is in a heavy modernisation mode, Ness Technologies president & CEO Sachi Gerlitz, told in an interview. With almost one third of its employees based in India, Ness has plans to have 5,000 employees in India as part of its growth strategy. The company opened its first special economic zone facility in Bangalore on Tuesday. Excerpts:

What kind of opportunities are you seeking in India?

Indian defence and government sector are some of the biggest opportunities. We are very much looking into opportunities to work with Indian Ministry of Defence. The multi-million dollar defence contract which we won to provide command and control system to Latin American government is one the value propositions that we have offered to the Indian government and we hope to implement the same here. As a vendor we look at Indian market in two different perspectives, on one hand, India is our software factory. From an employment perspective, this is the fastest growing geography for us.

What are your focus areas in the Indian defence sector and what are the applications?

One of the most fast growing market in the system integration space is the defence and home land security. We are focusing on three different types of solutions which are based on cutting edge technologies covering full spectrum for the Airforce, Army , Navy and special forces. On implementation of these systems Indian defence will be able to increase its efficiencies and perform better than before.

For example, some of our solutions will enable the defence forces to locate and use shorter passages to reach specific locations quickly and share data with each other in real time. All the forces are connected with each other by special communication devices which even gets data from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) during operations.

What kind of advantage do you have to tap the Indian market?

We are not targeting contracts which are worth billions of dollars, which allows us flexibility in the solutions that we offer. Independent vendors like us have got better capabilities to produce a solution that is coming from system integration point of view and not from a vendor that is applying software to support the platform. For example, at air traffic control (ATC) you have multiple radar’s in different locations and the issue is how to merge the visual information and data together.

We have developed a unique solution that can fuse the information. We expect after Indian defence finishes with bigger contracts, they will approach system integrators and solutions providers like us.

Posted in: India