Customers are looking to adopt technologies

IT companies are re-shuffling their services, solutions and product lines to match the needs in the current time. These companies are making extra efforts and investing more time to align their business models and trying to innovate things.

Collabera Inc.'s president and chief operating officer Mohan Sekhar talks to Pankaj Maru of CyberMedia News about the company's business strategy to overcome the downturn, new business avenues, understanding customers' requirement and their business needs with the cut in IT spends and technology trends. Excerpts:

Collabera has a strong presence in verticals such as government, manufacturing and retail, media and communication and financial services. So, can you brief us about your business strategy and plans to help your business grow in the global downturn?

With the IT budgets under pressure, a CIO’s priorities will be on the most pressing needs, which are: reducing the overall IT spends, improving IT efficiency, rationalization of IT systems and projects and improving time-to-market. We have re-aligned our go-to-market strategy to these exact needs.

In the last 12 months, we have significantly expanded our consulting as well as IT services portfolio. Our strategy is to deliver these capabilities in a well integrated way to provide point solutions in specific industries.

These point solutions are very much aligned to priorities of our clients today. For example, IT planning for M&A is a solution that is mapped to the banking sector that is seeing a lot of M&A activity. Another example is the enterprise mobility space which cuts across our key verticals.

And yet another key strategy is to invest in developing accelerators and assets that will enable us to “deliver more for less”. With IT spends under severe pressure, customers will work with IT providers who are more efficient and productive. Collabera Labs is an investment we have made in this direction.

Finally, on the customer segment, we are targeting medium-sized organizations which are looking to optimize their IT, drive efficiency and reduce their IT spend. Collabera is one of the few companies which has a true full services portfolio – spanning across consulting, IT solutions and managed IT services with the ability to deliver this through onsite, onshore and offshore models. This is a need even most of the large tier-1 IT companies don’t provide today and we have seen our customer segment very receptive to our approach.

In global context, India has seen lesser impact of the recession. So from a market perspective, what kind of technology based demands you are noticing presently? Is there any kind of trend in the technology and services space?

Customers are looking to adopt technologies that improve efficiency and productivity. One example is the collaboration space, where technology is likely to play a significant part in supporting a highly efficient and productive work environment. Related to this is the mobility space – for the company’s workforce as well as customers. Another area that is catching up is cloud computing. As IT spends are under pressure, innovative ways of IT management like cloud computing will become prominent.

Collabera is also in the segment of software testing and services. But with the US impact on the Indian software industry, did you witness any slump in software testing and services?

While there is a lot of news about IT services industry being impacted due to the developments in the US economy, the real impact has not been significant, especially in the IT outsourcing space. Economic slowdown has, in fact, made outsourcing to low cost geographies more imperative and we believe a lot more companies are aggressively looking to outsource to reduce their IT spend.

The sales cycle, for new initiatives, has been stretched since IT budgets are under pressure. However, there is an increased interest in outsourcing services, like application maintenance and testing which are the keys to keep the business running. At Collabera, we have not seen a significant impact due to the US economy.

Recently, Collabera was named by International Association of Outsourcing Professionals (IAOP) 2009 in Global Outsourcing 100 sublist. From the company perspective, how do you view such international recognition?

Given that we are a privately held company, third-party recognition is important to us since it increases our visibility and brand positioning with all our stake holders. This kind of recognition also goes a long way in creating a highly motivated workforce within Collabera and also helps our brand in the competitive recruitment marketplace. In today’s IT industry, where there are a large number of players competing for the same business, such recognitions create a positive impact and can influence the customer’s buying decisions.

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