Exigen Inc. started operating in 1992. Its headquarters are located in San Francisco, California, and Riga, Latvia. The company also has facilities in St. Petersburg, Russia, and Odessa, Ukraine. Privately held Exigen makes US$50-60 million in revenues annually with more that 800 employees. Its founders Greg Shenkman and Alec Miloslavsky earlier created another company, Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, a developer of call centre software now owned by Alcatel-Lucent SA.
Exigen specializes in high-level business process outsourcing for banking, insurance, telecom, media and government sectors. Among its customers there are AIG, Citigroup, Mastercard, Prudential, SAP, Universal, VISA and Warner Bros.
Outsourcing software developer StarSoft with annual turnover of $20-30 million was founded in 1991 and now employs more than 600 people. Its headquarters are located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and it has development facilities in St. Petersburg, Moscow and Kazan in Russia, and in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine. StarSoft serves such companies as CSC, IBM, T-Mobile and "the world's largest computer chipmaker" (the actual company name could not be disclosed under the contract terms).
The first contacts between StarSoft and Exigen date back to 1999. But at that time neither company was ready for the merger. Despite the fact that StarSoft is still smaller that Exigen its chief executive officer Nick Puntikov claims that the merger is not a means of selling the company and quitting the business. After the merger Puntikov was appointed Exigen president for Eastern Europe.
According to him, his main target was finding a US-based partner which would complement StarSoft's capabilities. At the same time Exigen that has the largest software development facilities in the Baltics began to feel constraints of the local labor market but entering Russia turned out to be not so easy as it might have seemed.
While Exigen tend to work on large-scale and long-term projects involving close interaction with the customer, StarSoft specializes in agile software development with fast tangible deliverables. This differentiation became the base for the merger on which the companies are going to complement each other.
The newly formed company will be called Exigen Services but will still operate under StarSoft brand in certain locations. It will work on projects ranging from simple team extension engagements managed by the customer to large-scale projects in offshore outsourcing of R&D for key business applications leveraging Exigen's technology expertise and fully managed by it.
Exigen plans to maximize the value of its services and avoid competing for hourly rates that switches developers' work into a sort of commodity.
"When the customer just employes the cheapest labor they do not solve their problems", said Alec Miloslavsky, chief executive officer of the new Exigen Services.