NEWS

EDS Technologies Going Strong in PLM Market

By VARINDIA - 2010-04-02

After Japan and China, India is perhaps the largest product designing and visualization market in the whole of Asia-Pacific. The basic reason behind it is the tremendous growth in the domestic automotive industry, heavy industry and development of large infrastructure. And, the second obvious reason is outsourcing of product designing to India from the US and European countries because of cheap labour.

Therefore, perhaps, all the major designing tool vendors are, today, present in this country, which include Dassault Delmia, Autodesk, PTC, Tata Technologies, UGS, etc. Keeping pace with this trend, the domestic software and services companies like Infosys, ITC Infotech, L&T Infotech, Geometric Software, HCL Technologies, Patni, Satyam, TCS, Wipro, etc. have sharpened their competencies in product designing, implementation and engineering services for global automotive and aerospace companies.

Besides product designing, the Indian market is also high on visual simulation or visual communication segment. Gaming is one large application where the gamers fly simulated fighter aircraft and hit the enemy targets. Not only this, there are a host of other gaming modules. Also, today, organizations prefer virtual reality or simulated conditions for training thousands of employees at a time. As the real estate business is becoming more organized and professional, even the construction companies are creating simulated environment in order to hook their clients. Therefore, the applications in designing and visualization or even simulation are developing very fast.

In this backdrop, VARIndia wanted to make some reality check as to how serious the tool vendors are and therefore spoke to S. Senthil, President, EDS Technologies Ltd.

EDS Technologies is a major reseller of IBM for Dassault Systems CATIA (Computer-Aided Three-Dimensional Interactive Application) products and many others for virtual simulation solutions. EDS distributes 15 different products in India.

According to Senthil, the entire PLM market in India is almost US$170 million. In this market, EDS is a major enabler. EDS is a major reseller of IBM in this space, contributing almost 60 per cent of the business. In fact, Dassault is the owner of the products and IBM reserves the right to sell and market Dassault products worldwide, as per their worldwide agreement. But EDS as a reseller not only sells the products to the customers as an extension of IBM, but also does a lot of value addition, which includes marketing, selling, implementation, support & service, training, consultancy, etc.

Senthil says, “We are into the PLM and visual communications market segment and CATIA is one of the largest business segments for us. We are now the specialist in PLM and specialist in visual simulation area as well. In fact, we are the single-largest visual simulation tool provider in India.”

“We have supplied simulation tools to government, defence and private sectors in the Indian marketplace. Simulation tool is something, which can provide virtual reality applications for PLM solutions and also can provide visual solution applications. Therefore, the customers can do a product visualization and application visualization and simulation also,” he adds.

The potential of PLM and simulation tools is very high in India, but, as per Senthil, the sad part is that the technology adoption in the Indian market or industry is very low. Giving an example, he says, India has 340 wildlife sanctuaries and they recruit huge manpower for maintenance of these sanctuaries, but they are not properly trained or skilled because of lack of infrastructure. Here, these software can come in handy and inexpensive in training the workforce in a simulated wildlife situation. He says similar to this, there are an umpteen number of areas where simulation software can be used, which actually is not happening.

However, EDS focus is to address large PSUs, government and defence departments aggressively. Then, it will go for infrastructure management companies.

In fact, established in 1995, EDS Technologies Pvt. Ltd. is the largest PLM Solutions and Real Time 3D Visual Simulation provider in India. The company is headquartered in Bangalore and has presence in Gurgaon, Pune, Mumbai, Chennai and Hyderabad. The company has over 110 skilled professionals with industry experience supporting customer requirements across the country. The company is supporting more than 2,000 CATIA licences across India for more than 600 customer sites over the past 12 years.

Finally…

Last year, the company’s turnover had touched Rs.55 crore, but this year, as per Senthil, EDS is going to cross Rs.75 crore.