AppLabs seeks contested testing services crown

(By Anthony Miller – Friday 26th June 2009 9:15am). Being as testing services is somewhat on our minds at the moment (see SQS back on even keel for now), we took the opportunity to meet up with Doc Parghi, European head of US-headquartered, but India-based testing services firm, AppLabs. AppLabs is having a bit of a PR tussle with SQS on who is the "world’s largest independent testing services company", with SQS the winner on revenues (€143m last year, vs AppLabs estimated $110m in the year to 31st March ’09) but AppLabs rather ahead on staff count, with some 2,000 heads, mostly in India, vs 1,400 at SQS, mostly in Europe. Anyway, both of these together don’t come near the leading India-based SIs, such as Wipro, which boasted testing services revenues near $500m in the year to 31st March ’09, and relevant headcount probably over 10,000 FTEs.

Both players entered the UK market by acquisition the same year (2006), SQS buying Cresta (which deal, by the way, was facilitated by our good friends at Regent) and AppLabs buying IS Integration. AppLabs has some 300 FTEs in the UK – much as did IS Integration – but whereas IS was purely an onshore business, AppLabs UK now has fully blended delivery. We will go into more detail on AppLabs in a future OffshoreViews note as we see the UK a prime battleground for the many players in a very fragmented testing services market (e.g. see SDLC Solutions carves out its piece of the testing market).