The company has maintained a 57 per cent growth rate annually for the past seven years. Scott Systems managing director Murali Santhanam said it would be able to maintain a 50 per cent growth for the next five years. With Mastech on a mergers and acquisitions spree, Scott Systems will need to train professionals to meet those needs, hence the growth, he added.

Mastech, which is listed on the Nasdaq, offered `split' shares resulting in a fall in price on the exchange. This is also believed to have delayed the introduction of the stock-option scheme here.

Scott Systems, Mastech's people resource centre worldwide, is focused on enterprise resource package (ERP) besides training people in Oracle applications,IBM mainframe, Java/HTML, Peoplesoft and Y2K. It plans to introduce SAP and other systems which are being evaluated for their technical and business potential, by December 1998.

Scott Systems has ensured that business is spread over the entire range of products, keeping its dependence on the Y2K training at 25 per cent of its total business, Santhanam said.

With the entire Information Technology (IT) industry focussing on the Y2K bug, new requirements were being ignored or put on the back burner. However, he admitted that once an organisation opened its systems to them, they were able to find business opportunities.

Mascot, the software development arm of Mastech in India headquartered in Bangalore, will open its Pune office later this year. Scott Systems, which is based in Pune, recently opened an office in Calcutta and there are no plans to open new offices in the current year. It has offices in Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad and Delhi in addition to which it coordinates Colombo from Pune andChennai. Mastech is scheduled to open offices in Switzerland and the Netherlands later this year besides acquiring some companies globally. This will help its Indian operations grow, too, Santhanam said.

Scott Systems is the only organised effort which recruits and trains people to meet global standards, with a `finishing school' capsule enabling its professionals to integrate into local conditions easily. The company achieved 1,000 placements during 1997 and has projected up to 1800 this year, amounting to 150 per month. Mastech has targeted a $500 million turnover by 2000, employing 7,500 people and a turnover of $1 billion by 2005.