India provides potentially big revenue opportunity

Sachin Saxena, vice president, Product Management and Marketing at GlobalLogic in his interaction with Prasoon Srivastava of CIOL discussed present business models, strategy and a few technology trends that his company is foreseeing in the global market. Excerpts:

What kind of contribution you make to companies in consumer segment? Can you explain this in terms of the kind of work that you have done for Yahoo, You send It and Kodak?

In the consumer segment, today we are working with companies in two verticals - retail and digital media. We engage with customers in all product lifecycle. On the retail front, we have been involved with design and architecture of travel portals like TravelGuru and MakeMyTrip. We have built social commerce sites like Kaboodle.

On the Digital Media front, we provide engineering teams for Washington Post education portal, which provides online college counseling for students. We were significant part of the engineering team for Maven that was acquired by Yahoo and was their video ad insertion platform.

Additionally, we are working on various other advertising marketplaces for EMG. For companies like Kodak, we are building some products of their 'print on demand' solutions. Our work includes working on both foundational technologies (Ruby on Rails) to Cloud computing and Mobile platforms.

How do you approach and deliver solutions to enterprise, directly or indirectly through vendors?

Our approach is multi-dimensional. We have worked directly for the classic for companies like ISV, BMC, CA, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, and Cisco. They are going directly to consumers with digital solutions like 'video-on-demand'. They are not the classic ISV, but they have traditionally used technology to provide a service or a solution to their customers.

Finally, there is a growing segment of new service providers, software enabling companies. They might provide a service to the customer and use technology like SaaS solutions to either increase their engagements with their customers or to serve them at a different price point. These are companies like Fishbowl who provide an email campaign management service to the restaurant industry.

There are companies like McKinsey who now have a very significant web presence to provide both paid and free content like articles on strategy, marketing, operations, HR and so on. This way, McKinsey is able to monetize and brand themselves outside of the board rooms of fortune 1000 companies. The common theme to all these is, “We build IP for CTO, we don't provide IT for CIO”.

What is the upcoming trend you are witnessing at the enterprise level when it comes to the delivery of service to consumers in the retail segment?

In mobility segment, we are seeing solutions that enable customers to shop online at any time and at any location through their mobile devices, which are in demand. The solutions are designed to attract new shoppers via coupons.

Location based advertisements engage with existing solutions like product information to support store personnel to be more productive and knowledgeable.

When it comes to social commerce and social CRM, we are seeing social shopping communities that assist a buyer's decision-making process through the collaboration of product discovery and rating engines picking up.

Some of the other major developments are taking place in market intelligence domain. Commerce has moved out of the physical store to the online world. For retailers and manufacturers, online commerce is no longer limited to shopping on their websites. They want to provide cross-channel selling capability.

Using social media tools like Twitter and Facebook, they should be able to gauge demand and shape supply accordingly. To stay competitive, retailers and manufacturers will have to rely on data mining, use complex data transformation and analytical reporting and extract business intelligence out of this exponentially growing information to keep pace with ever-changing consumer needs and an increasing number of competitors.

How does GlobalLogic see Indian market for its business?

Indian market for products is also maturing with global companies looking at value creation in India rather than cost arbitrage. While Indian players are making products for Indian market, Global giants understand that one size does not fit all. They need to change their products to suit Indian requirements, whether business, legal or commercial.

We are also witnessing a change in Indian psyche wherein people want to take risks and create products rather than just providing services. Our understandings of product development coupled with experience garnered over last 10 years, working with more than 180 product companies, are much sought after. Our India business is poised for maximum growth as compared to other regions where all we operate.

Which are the verticals in India that you find are most aggressively transforming themselves?

In India the activity is happening in all the verticals and hence difficult to pick just a few. We are seeing mobile, embedded, telecom, financial compliance and retail to be major areas which are transforming themselves with new ideas. Some of the products being made out of India would have variants which will cater to global markets as well.

Which is the most exciting project that GlobalLogic is working on? What kind of transformation we may see for both consumers and enterprises after this project is implemented?

It is hard to pick one customer. However, across verticals, there are two very exciting trends we are seeing, they are in the area of mobile as a computing platforms and the adoption of cloud/SaaS based solutions. Both these trends are taking computing into the hands, pockets of, and now over the air (in the cloud) for, the user.

When computing moved from mainframe to desktop, there was a mushrooming of new products and growth. We see a similar growth of products and services resulting from these two new computing platforms. Mobile is further along the way and more mature with OS like iPhone, Android, BREW, Symbian. Cloud platforms are strong contender, but still evolving, as the platforms are still being built.

Since you have businesses spread across major economies, is GlobalLogic internally sensing signs of economic recovery in its major markets?

Financially speaking, Q4 2009 was the worst time. Since then, business has been picking up. In 2009, economist wondered if the recovery would be V, U or L shaped. We are seeing a V shaped recovery pattern. The drop has stopped. There are signs of stabilization and new signs of growth.

Clearly we are not back at the pre-2009 levels, but now there is hope. Business environment is tough and more competitive, but we continue to grow our business. Customers continue to show a 'flight towards quality and stability', and these are both good for GlobalLogic.

What kind of capacity building or enhancement GlobalLogic is planning in India?

First of all, I want to remind that one of our key differentiators is our global presence. Our global presence allows us to provide unique services such as providing localization or the capability to build and design products for specific markets like Latin America, China, Eastern Europe and India.

Having said that, I want to emphasize that India is one of our largest delivery centers. India will continue to play a significant part of our growth story. Many of our customers are looking to revenue growth in emerging markets. India provides our customers potentially big revenue opportunity as a very mature talent pool to build products that can serve these local markets.

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