"Nordic IT spending is $40 billion"

Tom Scharning, Senior Vice President (Business Development), EDB Business Partner, an Oslo-based $1.5-billion IT services company, was in Bangalore recently and met with BT’s Rahul Sachitanand. Excerpts:

What is the market opportunity in the Nordic region?
It is estimated that companies in the Nordic market will spend around $40 billion on IT services requirements. Industries such as financial services, telecom and manufacturing lead spending on IT, although segments such as government and manufacturing are not far behind.

How can Indian companies increase their competitiveness in this market?
Indian companies have been active in the Nordic market, but their impact has been minimal. They must understand local context and culture to increase their presence here. In the case of EDB, for example, our CEO is minutes away from the CEO of our biggest customer.

What are your expansion plans?
We need to rapidly expand our offshore presence and we have acquired Span Infotech, which was one of the earliest Indian IT companies to enter the Swedish market. We have made around 20 M&A deals across the world to expand our global presence. While Span will open another facility in Mysore, we plan to have around 40 per cent of our headcount in offshore locations, versus 20 per cent now.