For the Record: YASH Technologies opens an Iowa office
After serving the Greater Des Moines market remotely from its Moline, Ill., office for the past two years, YASH Technologies Inc. has opened a development office in Urbandale. A global information technology solutions provider, YASH began in 1996 as an information technology (IT) partner with Deere & Co. The company now has more than 2,200 employees working from 18 regional sales and development centers on three continents.
“One of the things we saw was that the Des Moines market was underserved with IT consulting firms,” said Srikaran Ramaseshan, YASH’s regional director for Iowa. “We found most of the IT companies in this segment were either staffing companies or very small niche competitors of ours. We wanted to provide a local service with a global perspective.”
The company, which specializes in implementing software applications such as enterprise resource planning, business intelligence and e-business solutions, has established strategic alliances with a number of software development companies, among them SAP AG, Microsoft Corp., Oracle Corp. and IBM Corp. A privately held company, YASH has approximately $110 million in annual revenues and zero debt, Ramaseshan said.
“We are very conservative when we pick a place, but then we are very aggressive once we are there,” he said.
Ramaseshan said the prominence of Greater Des Moines as an insurance and financial services hub, along with the area’s stable economy, made it a good choice for expansion as YASH seeks to add more clients in that market niche. YASH primarily works with medium-sized to large enterprises, defined as companies with between $600 million and $5 billion in annual revenues.
YASH currently has a mix of 30 full-time and contract employees based at the Urbandale office, and plans to expand that number to approximately 100 by the end of 2012, Ramaseshan said. Those employees include project managers, business analysts, system architects and software consultants with salaries ranging from $75,000 to $90,000.