Spotting M&A opportunity, martinwolf opens Bangalore office

As tech companies — vendors that build product — and integrators that customize and integrate that product into larger solutions — strive for scale, there’s growing opportunity for cross-border mergers. That’s why martinwolf M&A Advisors of San Rafael, Calif. is opening an office in Bangalore.

In the past few years, Martinwolf  handled  Rolta India Ltd’s acquisition of TUSC, a large U.S.-based Oracle implementation partner and Hinduja TMT’s buyout of Affina, a U.S.-based business process optimization company. But Marty Wolf, CEO of the company, said the amount of interest in such deals is picking up, making the local presence necessary.  Gaurav Sharma, a former executive with IBM Global Services, will head the new office as SVP of the India practice.

One motivating force is that a number of mid-sized Indian tech companies — the layer below the giants like Wipro, Tata, Infosys etc. — need to grow to survive, Wolf said. And, it’s time for the world to acknowledge that these companies are more than low-cost leaders.  ”Their advantage goes way beyond cost,” he said. “In many cases they offer getter solutions faster and cheaper than [U.S. competitors]. The beneficiaries are the end users.”

These mid-sized companies have great expertise but often lack the channel and partners to implement it in the field far from home and are looking for partners in the U.S. and elsewhere to do that for them. In that respect, Wolf hopes to act as a matchmaker for companies in India and the U.S. but is also working on deals with companies in Israel and elsewhere.

Going forward more these deals have a distinct cloud flavor, Wolf said.

“India, as in the U.S., large legacy software and ERP firms are transitioning to the cloud. But the transition will be slower and more gradual than by the U.S. based firms.  In India, we be will seeing specialized vertical services integration deals in cloud that are now beginning to take shape.  Also, we will see reverse integration of companies in India with back-end cloud offerings seek acquisitions of large global systems integrators.”

Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user Melanie-m

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