Bristlecone, a major SAP partner owned by India’s Mahindra Group, is planning new investments and its first-ever acquisitions to expand its supply chain business and broaden its product and service offerings, addressing supply chain challenges for global Fortune 1000 companies.
Bristlecone was formed 27 years ago by people who worked in the supply chain business of global ERP software company SAP, said Lakshmanan Chidambaram, known as CTL, CEO and managing director of the San Jose, Calif.-based solution provider.
It is part of India-based Mahindra Group, a $25 billion conglomerate. “They are into manufacturing two-wheelers, four-wheelers, six-wheelers, eight-wheelers, small aircraft, so on and so forth, and so are deep in supply chains,” CTL told CRN.
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The Mahindra Group purchased Bristlecone about 25 years ago and currently owns 96 percent of the company with the remaining 4 percent owned by employees, CTL said.
“So Bristlecone has been a part of the Mahindra Group for a long time now,” he said. “At that time, the parent group wanted Bristlecone for its own captive needs because supply chain is so important within the Mahindra Group, which is a manufacturing giant.”
However, Mahindra Group also realized that supply chains were a major issue for Fortune 1000 companies globally as well, CTL said.
“Hence they decided to let Bristlecone find its own destiny,” he said. “Mahindra is an important customer, but we work with many, many other customers across the globe. And if I want to describe Bristlecone in a few sentences, and I’ll tell you why I took this job, Bristlecone is one of the world’s largest pure-play end-to-end supply chain consulting companies.”
CTL previously ran the Americas business for Tech Mahindra, a global provider of digital transformation, consulting and business re-engineering services and No. 23 on CRN’s 2025 Solution Provider 500. CTL also served as a group executive board member of the Mahindra Group. He joined Bristlecone in July 2025.
Bristlecone has not made any acquisitions but has instead grown organically. CTL said it is now seriously looking at making acquisitions to grow its products and services businesses faster.
“But not any acquisition,” he said. “We’ll have to think carefully about acquisitions because if you do the wrong things, it will drain resources, right? We have a clear idea of what we want. We are working on crossing some of the t’s and dotting some of the I’s. We will definitely look at this very seriously.”
CTL declined to provide financial details about Bristlecone given that Mahindra Group does not break out the company’s numbers separately. However, he did say revenue over the last year grew 30 percent. About 70 percent of total revenue comes from the U.S. All the company’s revenue comes from business around SAP’s supply chain business, he said.
CTL also said Bristlecone’s business is centered around four verticals: retail, consumer products, manufacturing, and high tech and life sciences.
“We’ve clearly defined a razor-sharp focus on markets,” he said. “In terms of services, it’s product engineering, SAP ERP rollouts and supply chain. And in supply chain, it’s everything from planning to procurement to … transport management to warehouse management to last-mile mobility. Everything, end to end.”
Bristlecone also has a very unique dual model, CTL said. It competes with consulting companies like McKinsey & Company and Bain & Company to make recommendations, and it provides a technical team that implements those recommendations and ties them to business outcomes, he said.
Bristlecone’s consultants tackle complex supply chain problems for a wide range of customers, CTL said. Those customers include:
- A leading U.S. aircraft manufacturer which told Bristlecone that 20 percent of the time its aircraft is parked on the ground because repairs don’t finish on time.
- A beverage company was able to cut $100 million out of its supply chain costs when Bristlecone helped decrease its global product rollout times by 20 percent.
- Bristlecone helped one of the leading hyperscalers with planning all its global data center rollouts, as well as with its warehouse and transportation management.
“We understand the domain very well, and we can solve complex problems in this space,” he said. “That gives us a unique edge. And one of the reasons [the Mahindra Group CEO] wanted me to join Bristlecone was he wanted to scale the business without making it a me-too company. Make it go deeper into the supply chain. Because the philosophy within the Mahindra Group is do less, think big, go deep, execute flawlessly. That’s how we execute each of our businesses.”
Bristlecone’s capabilities have become critical for customers dealing with multiple issues, CTL said.
“Look at what’s happening with the crisis in the Middle East,” he said. “Supply chains are front and center. The issues never go away. They keep coming in some form or the other. And these are big problems. The fact that we do supply chain for the Mahindra Group and for other Fortune 1000 corporations gives us a very unique front-seat view of what’s happening.”
To meet new challenges, Bristlecone is making some big investments, including tripling the size of its consulting practice and doubling its sales team, CTL said.
“We’re putting money into bringing other product partnerships in the supply chain space,” he said. “That will expand the offerings we have in the space. We’re deepening our partnership with SAP, which was already a very strong partnership. There’s an acquisition plan in play. We intend to bring in new products.”
One of Bristlecone’s key offerings is Trace.ai. CTL said the company has uploaded details of 350 global carriers so that when a company ships something out, Trace.ai can offer a complete view of the status of the shipment as it moves via ships, trains, and/or trucks, he said.
“Many times, we can give better predictions than the carriers themselves because we have a multimodal view,” he said. “We also have access to external data, such as what’s happening with the weather, with piracy, the internet, the war in the Middle East. We get the data and superimpose it on the customer supply chain, and so can make much better predictions.”
CTL said his vision is to make sure 30 percent of Bristlecone’s revenue comes from the existing and new product sets where the company knows exactly where the supply chain is broken, which is why it is investing in creating more products.
“We’ve already identified areas where the supply chain is broken,” he said. “We believe that we can bring products into play that will solve these problems. We want to delink revenue from people deployed and make that 30 percent of our revenue. The other 70 percent comes from consulting, services and technical implementations around those products.”
