pled.
What's the biggest challenge for the industry now?
With the challenges I've mentioned, there needs to be new thinking. People are thinking, "do I go to the big boys and just see what they have?" Unfortunately many of these big organizations don't have the agility. You grow so big, and you spend so much time on red tape rather than on innovation. Some of them have been letting down their customers in terms of innovation. By talking to so many people, it takes much longer to make a creative decision.
What's the latest on the transformation Orga is going through?
When I came in, we had a world-class product. So that first thing we wanted to do was continue the investment in the product, particularly in terms of proving that it is as scalable as we think it is. We went through rigorous benchmarking with IBM, and when we announced it, there were 145 million convergence subscribers on one platform with 20% more in voice than any other competitor per hour with 33% less hardware.
We are also looking at how we can leverage our platform into the other industries because we can see the traction is needed there. These include the utility and energy sectors, and mobile payments.
What we didn't do very well in the past was be close to the customer. We have quadrupled our sales force, so we are present in 18 more territories, and now in a total of 40 countries. Also before I joined, one of the handicaps we had was we did not cooperate very well with channels. We have opened up to more alliances and we have 12 channels, including the big boys like IBM, Accenture and so on.
We have decentralized the organization to make it more global and be closer to the customer in terms of management. We have spread out delivery and support. We opened two centers ?one in Buenos Aires and other in Kolkatta. Together with our centers in Europe, we provide 24/7 support.
We have started to see the benefits of the changes. Last year we sold about 25% more than we ever did, that's in terms of orders. In terms of revenue, we've grown 10% and we are projecting at least 20% revenue growth this year. With what's going on in the world economy you never know. We're starting to see some dipping again.
Are you looking at diversifying away from high-tech industries?
I would be very cautious to say "diversify." I think all the other industries are in need of this because everything is going out to mobile.
With the next generation that is very digital-aware, we are looking at industries like healthcare, where 200 million people in the developed world could be using this. And you can imagine what this means to government spending, taxpayers' money. For the developing world, there is about one bed per 1,000 population compared to 10 beds per 1,000 in the developed world. It's not actually about the number of beds but the number of nurses and doctors and the facility that you provided for them.
So if you are able to, with mobile communication, get the data ?instead of nurses and doctors going to the beds ?and alert them if something goes wrong, then you are able to scale that service. This is something that we are looking to this year.