Unisys sees unlimited opportunities in India

Sharath Kumar

BANGALORE, INDIA: Unisys India, a worldwide information technology company, provides a portfolio of IT services, software, and technology that solves critical problems for clients. Unisys serves commercial organizations and government agencies throughout the world.

On the completion of 10 years of existence in India, Kumar Prabhas, MD, Unisys India speaks on the company journey and vision for world and India markets. Excerpts from the interview:

CIOL:. Unisys Global Services India has just completed 10 years, how do you see the journey so far?

Kumar Prabhas: We just completed 10 years and it has been very exciting journey so far. A lot of people here are very proud of those 10 years in terms of what we have achieved, where we were five years ago and where we are now. Overall, it has been very good. My predecessor was leading it for the first four years and I have been here for over six years.

Unisys Global Services India (UGSI) was formed 10 years ago and we started from scratch. In the last five years, we have grown well in terms of both quantity and quality. From a headcount perspective, we have grown 70 percent over the last five years. Today, we are 4,300 people, but when you grow by 70 percent, you also have to look at two other aspects of the growth. Headcount is one measure but the other measure is - are we doing more work per person than we were five years ago?

And, if I look at that, with regard to productivity per person, we have improved by at least 30 percent over the last five years. This means that while the headcount has grown by 70 percent, the actual volume of work has grown by more than 100 percent in the last five years.

The other dimension is the type and portfolio of work that we deliver from here. I have to say that there has been a huge amount of moving up the value chain when it comes to the kind of work that we deliver from India now vs. five years ago.

CIOL: Can you share with you some of the key technology products engineering that has happened from India?

KP: UGSI has been a key participant in development of all Unisys product families, including ClearPath, Forward, Stealth, and Choreographer. In addition, we have delivered worldwide center for system and product testing, worldwide center for UI development, and contributed to approximately 20 percent of all patents filed annually by Unisys.

The UGSI is also recognized as Stage 5 (highest level) in the Most Admire Knowledge Enterprise (MAKE) framework.

CIOL: What about the vertical focus and and carrier opportunities UGSI has offered?

KP: Biometrics, Mobility and Aviation have been our key vertical focus. We offer our clients what we call end user services and data center related work. The primary difference is that the end user services are for a single user whereas data center is something where you deal with services, database, storage and those kind of things.

Along with these two, we have application modernization as well as maintenance and operations and finally product engineering. We have also added a number of high end practices such as our Architect practice, which does all kind of architecture work for our company; Sales, Marketing, and Solution Management; Project Management; and Business Operations and Analytics.

These four areas, what we call practices, have been added to the standard delivery towers that we talked about earlier and we have grown significantly in these high end practice areas. That is the mix of work that we are delivering and as you can see what used to be just pure standard delivery towers is now mixed with high end practices.

As you add these practices to the standard delivery towers, people have more areas to grow into and they can look for longer term career growth with Unisys. In fact that is the key differentiator, I would say, that we have in Unisys India, where we focus a lot on how people can grow their career with us.

CIOL: For most companies that last two-three years have been a challenging due to difficult economic conditions. How has it been for Unisys?

KP: Unisys India has two distinct pieces: one that focuses on the domestic market, and the other that focuses on part of the global delivery market. The domestic market focus that we have in India is very selective; we focus on specific areas of strengths that we have. And there are two types of work that we really do, one is where we are very strong globally and we want to leverage the same position in the Indian market.

I will give you an example - Transportation, particularly airlines and airports, both on passenger and cargo side - we are very strong, so we focus on that in the Indian market as well. Biometrics - identification and credentialing - which is our core LEIDA framework that we talked about, we are very strong in that worldwide, so we focus on that in the Indian market as well. The areas where we are very well positioned globally and we leverage the same in India.

In addition, we have global outsourcing contracts, which also have those customers' Indian entities, and we need to support the Indian entities as part of the global outsourcing contract. Predominantly, the Indian market is approached into two ways - one is areas where we have very strong portfolios like Transportation and Security, so we apply that to Indian market and through global outsourcing contracts, we serve their Indian entities as well.

Because we are very selective, it's not so much about how the Indian market is growing because it's a small portion of our overall footprint. Global delivery has been the mainstay of Unisys India, and there we have continued to grow including the last two years. What happens is that our growth in India gets decided by two things; either we move more existing work to India or the new clients that we get for the company have a significant offshore component, and in both places we have grown in the last couple of years as I said earlier.

CIOL: Can you share with some of the recent implementations on aviation front?

KP: Unisys was master systems integrator for Terminal 3 of Delhi International Airport (DIAL), where we achieved on-time opening of the terminal in time for the 2010 Commonwealth Games. Unisys was responsible for developing detailed operational procedures for various control centers in the airport, testing the IT systems, and verifying that the integrated IT platform meets the necessary requirements.

Unisys has worked with Air India for more than 30 years to provide services and technology, including the Unisys Passenger Service System and ClearPath Dorado servers.

CIOL: Security has been one of the important verticals of Unisys. How do you see India as a market for these solutions and what are you key implementations here in this area?

KP: Our operations in India play an important role in the biometric solutions we provide globally. At the heart of those systems are the identification and credentialing mechanisms, which I mentioned earlier, and that's what we are very good at. We are not doing any large projects right now in India in that area, but we are pursuing that market aggressively.

Globally, we have a number of projects going on in the identification and credentialing area. We have very big projects in three to four areas worldwide and in Europe too we have started a few projects. So, it's an area where we have a number of high profile, mission-critical projects going on worldwide.

CIOL: How do you foresee the India market in adopting your technology solutions?

KP: I see a big market. Border immigration and ports are very important areas. If you look at the commercial sector, they use same solutions. For example, one of the students during our Cloud 20/20 contest did a project on this area. When you walk into a store, why do you have to swipe your credit card? Why can't you just swipe your finger? When you do that, the information immediately goes to your bank, which authenticates it and then clears the payment. That was the student's project!

The opportunities are unlimited, when you talk about identification and credentialing. UID is a great platform to start some of those things, but UID is only a platform to identify who you are. Now, how do you apply that to various other applications or industries? There are a lot of opportunities for our kind of expertise and offerings.