The expansion of this Chennai-based company comes close on the heels of its new high-end customer wins and the growing demand for its enterprise system management (ESM) services.
The capital infusion from Barings International in December 2005 has also helped the company to scale up its operations from 220 employees to 750-plus employees in the last five months.
Barings Private Equity pumped in $4 million (about Rs 18 crore) to pick up over 50 per cent stake in Maples. The remaining stake is held by N Ram Subramani, the managing director of the company, who promoted it in 2002.
It has funded the expansion mostly through its internal accruals. The new facility, which will have a seating capacity for 360 people to work on three shifts, will house a data centre, network and security operations centres and high-end servers like IBM mainframe, HP and Sun to provide remote IT infrastructure management services.
Addressing a press conference, N Ram Subramani said Maples focused on remote IT infrastructure management for high-end servers while others in the business focused mostly on desktop management.
He added that Maples was the only mid segment player which could offer full turnkey enterprises system management services.
As for ESM, Maples manages the complexity of OS, database and networks for big companies like IBM and Standard Chartered Bank. Maples is the largest single vendor in ESM services for IBM in India.
It has 493 professionals working in the IBM facilities at Bangalore and Hyderabad. It has also won orders for ESM services from many high-end clients in India.
It currently has 750-plus technical professionals. "The number of professionals will increase to 1500 by the end of 2006. We will grow to 2500 people by the end of 2007," he said.
Maples, which clocked a turnover of about $3 million for 2005, hopes to close this calendar year with a topline of close to $10 million. "Going by the current trend of demand in market place, we hope to reach a revenue of Rs 25 million by 2007," he added.
The company's core business focus areas are enterprise systems management (ESM) and enterprise application services (EAS). To support these two consulting practices, it has a technical training division, which serves as a feeder.
Maples has presence across several cities in the country including Bangalore, Hyderabad and Pune. It has also established a base in the US and Japan.
Stating that the addressable market for remote IT infrastructure management was $200 billion, Subramani said the company had positioned itself as a mid-segment player and would focus on companies in the US and Japan.
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