2009 was a year when the world went through a severe financial crisis. We had to renegotiate contracts and identify creative ways to become leaner and more agile. However, we made a conscious decision to build our practice and delivery capabilities. We hired some very talented people in our product development and process teams. We stepped up and worked harder. We thought out of the box to help our clients improve productivity at even lower costs. As a result, our top line numbers have doubled compared to last year and our team has grown significantly. We added several leading startups in the Advertising Network, Travel & Hospitality, Education, Logistics and Consumer Internet verticals to our client portfolio. In March 2010 we will be moving to our new state-of-the art office facility which will have a capacity to seat 900 people. The improved infrastructure is part of our strategy to provide the right environment, tools and facilities to our people.
Outsourcing has allowed our clients to break down processes into small segments, with each activity performed in the most efficient, cost-effective way. We have seen an openness and increased awareness among startups in the East Cost (New York, Boston) and Silicon Valley to leverage the global labor pool and talent independent of location. The startup activity coming out of Europe, especially UK is also promising and we hope to work with more companies from that region this year.
The improvement in broadband, VoIP and web-based collaboration & project management tools over the last decade has made it much easier to work with distributed teams. The startups that we are working with are realizing significant cost savings and improved efficiencies by outsourcing product development and back-end data & content services. Clients that have their own engineering teams see value in getting non-customer facing applications such as CRM, Dashboard and Supply Chain applications developed by our team. It allows their internal teams to focus on the core products. Similarly, our data entry and research teams are helping scale up the content creation and data collection effort that Consumer Internet companies for instance have to deal with to build their databases, moderate content and tag information.
As we have grown, we have maintained our focus on providing personalized service and attention to details. Our management team continues to be closely involved with our clients and it’s our priority to be able to react to customer needs quickly.
The energy and pace of innovation in the startup world is as exciting as we have seen in the last five years. We are looking forward to being a part of new success stories in 2010 when some of our clients will get acquired, others will hit new milestones and some may even go public as the market opens up!
