Most of the Indian companies have been on an acquisition spree, especially in the last five years. Companies from every sector are acquiring firms abroad. The IT sector is not an exception. As a rule, it is only big firms in each and every sector that lead in acquisitions. But in the IT sector, a small firm is a leading acquirer - not any Tier I company like the Infosys, TCS or Wipro. A Tier II company which has remained quite unknown till recently, has become the biggest acquirer in the IT sector. The company is Subex, which has acquired 10 companies since 2000. Its acquisition of Azure Solutions, a UK-based company for US$140 mn was the biggest acquisition by an Indian IT firm. The most important thing in the acquisition was that the deal size was four times bigger than that of Subex in terms of revenue. The combined entity is now known as Subex Azure Limited. In January 2007, Subex announced that it had entered into an agreement with Syndesis to acquire the latter for US$164.5 mn, making it the largest purchase by an IT company abroad, beating its own landmark acquisition of Azure.
Subex Azure Limited is the world's biggest vendor of revenue maximization solutions for telecom operators. It is the pioneer of a concept called Revenue Operations Center (ROC) (See Box 1). It serves 150 customers in 60 countries and 23 of world's top 40 telecom operators. It has offices in Bangalore, London, Beijing, Singapore, Sydney, Dubai, Denver, Ottawa, and Ipswich. |
