Saurabh Sinha remembers his first visit to Nashville well. It was the only city he had visited in America where a potential client met him at the airport. "I loved the city," says the 31-year-old native of India, recalling his first visit in 2002. "It had all the facilities of a large city, but it was so much easier to get around and you could meet people quickly."
Two years later, Sinha relocated eMids, an offshore and onshore outsourcing company that he co-founded in 1999, from the Silicon Valley to Nashville.
"We were looking for geography that was underserved, and we found that in Nashville," says Sinha, who is president of the company. "At that time, and even today, there were few players like us. We saw an opportunity to help corporations here adopt a model that larger cities are already adopting to get a competitive edge."
He's referring to eMids' global delivery model. With support offices in Bangalore, India, eMids offers its customers IT and business process outsourcing services, including application development and maintenance, package support, independent testing, quality assurance, and health care claims adjudication. The company's client list includes big Nashville names like Corrections Corporation of America and Bridgestone Firestone.
Since its move to Nashville, eMids has achieved a compound growth rate of 150%, says Michael Hollis, vice president of sales and marketing. In 2005, the company had 90 full-time employees. Today, it employs about 220 people — with about 22 in Nashville, 20 in an office near Boston and the majority of its headcount in Bangalore. By the end of 2007, Hollis says eMids hopes to have a total of about 300 employees.
Sinha attributes much of the company's growth to Nashville's health care industry, a conservative industry that he says, due primarily to HIPAA and data security issues, was late to adopt the global delivery model embraced by other industries in the late 1990s. Recently, though, health care companies have been developing new strategies for IT and business process outsourcing. That fact, coupled with Tennessee's low unemployment rate, has driven the demand for eMids' services.
"For the last couple of years, the unemployment rate has been either close to the national average or dipping below it. That implies there is a shortage of skilled managers," Sinha says. "Customers want to use us to get things done right and efficiently."
As a result, eMids, too, needs project and program managers, as well as business analysts, in Nashville — where eMids' client services group manages the company's contracts. By the end of the year, the company hopes to increase the number of full-time employees in Nashville to about 35.
"We need onsite and onshore resources that work with offshore teams," Sinha says. "We have a strong presence in health care and are hiring people who have that background, but we also need people who can serve manufacturing and larger public companies."
Hollis and Sinah say eMids has hired folks from Nevada, Missouri, Ohio and more.
"Once you get them off the airplane," Sinha says, "they want to stay here."
