The two-decade-old Alten Calsoft Labs has a dedicated Centre of Excellence (CoE) with over 200 professionals working with leading Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and enterprises including Fortune 500 and global top 100 organizations. The company has been identified as one of the ‘Top 10’ healthcare technology solution providers by CIO Review Magazine. There is a huge growth opportunity in the space of good laboratory practices, Somenath Nag, Director – ISV and Enterprise Solutions, Alten Calsoft Labs tells Nandita Vijay, in an interaction over email excerpts:

What are the latest efforts of Alten Calsoft Labs to increase their Indian business opportunity in the pharma, biotech and healthcare space with GLP?
Alten Calsoft Labs has chartered three initiatives to increase Indian business opportunities in the pharma, biotech, and healthcare space. The first is the importance given by us to focus on cloud-based solutions. This is seen to enable Indian companies to adopt information technology solutions for good laboratory practices (GLP) with lower upfront investment. Our cloud-based approach will help companies to integrate different business processes related to GLP quickly and efficiently. The second is on mobile device-based solutions. This is primarily to capture electronic data as and where it is produced to improve efficiency and reduce data loss. Third is the attention to cloud-based big data analytics solutions. It will enhance storage, retrieval and analysis of data to generate real-time/results as and when required.

When did the company’s operations begin in India?
In India, the company has been operating for the past two decades. Predominantly, during this period, Alten Calsoft Labs utilized Indian talent pool to serve its international customers. Backed by the comprehensive experience accumulated through servicing international life sciences and healthcare customers, we have devised our market strategy to bring in the global best practices to Indian market.

What is your unique selling proposition (USP) among the several players offering similar solutions?
Our key differentiators are the ability to provide custom solutions based on modern technologies that are fit for our customers business rather than providing a generic pre-built solution. We also have the experience in working with leading life sciences and healthcare companies across the globe that enables us to bring the best practices to Indian market. More over, our team has the ability to build ‘product-grade’ solutions based on our rich experience of working with leading global product companies.

Which are the leading companies taking your services for health informatics, medical devices and life sciences?
We work with leading product companies in health informatics, medical devices and life sciences across the globe, but will not be able to disclose their names because of confidentiality reasons and have singed business pact with them.

Which are the revenue drivers for the company?
At this point of time health informatics is the predominant revenue driver, but we expect to see faster revenue growth in medical devices or life sciences segments also.

How much does the international business constitute? What has been the impact of the global economic slowdown on getting orders?
At this point of time international business constitutes almost 98 per cent. We have not experienced any negative impact on our growth in healthcare & life sciences segments. On the contrary we have seen steady growth in this segment both in our existing customers’ business as well as in acquiring new customers.

With cloud computing seen as a trend, what are Alten Calsoft Lab efforts in this domain?
Cloud computing is core to Alten Calsoft Labs’ strategy. We have a centre of excellence focused on Cloud computing and Big Data solutions. Alten Calsoft Labs has established partnerships with leading cloud service providers and has built multiple solutions that makes cloud adoption faster, easier and efficient.

What are the challenges you see in the business growth?
The two challenges that we encounter are skill crunch and fragmented market.

With regards to skill crunch, the overall, the industry is experiencing a major skill crunch. Inadequacy of engineering talent equipped with both business & technology acumen is acting as a major deterrent to the growth. Now coming to the second challenge which is fragmented market, the reality is that the from an Indian perspective we find that absence of consolidation throws up multiple challenges including ‘economies of scale’.