"We would like to build a model of multiple career pathing"

Sukant, has been with Keane for over 10 years during which he has held various key leadership positions. As the vice president, Global Services Integration Team (GSIT) at Keane, Sukant has led a group of specialized outsourcing experts, adept in creating global application outsourcing solutions. A passionate musician, and an avid golfer, Sukant firmly believes in 'taking care of oneself' in this age and is regular with his workout routines.

Aparna Lal, from CIOL caught up with him in a one-on-one discussion to know more about Keane, finer details of application outsourcing as a business, and Sukant's vision for his organisation, as well as their plans for India.

Excerpts from the same.

Keane, today, tomorrow

Keane is a Boston based IT services and business process outsourcing and consulting company, we have been in the business for last 40+ years. We have been very strong in US, UK, India, Canada and have recently entered the Australian market place. We have about 10,000 employees worldwide with 2800 people in India, growing at the rate of 70-80% per year. India is an important piece of our future strategy and we plan to invest 50-100 million dollars over next 3-5 years; we see ourselves within 10,000-15,000 employee range within that time span.

We would not like to just add numbers along low cost commodotized services, but would like to grow through providing Transformational Business Solutions (TBS) to our customers. According to me, TBS are quite different from the regular business services that seek to reduce the IT cost for the CIO. Transformational Business Solutions is one that can help the customer increase their revenue; improve their profitability; improve branding as well the market share. If a solution hits one or more of these objectives then in our way of thinking it qualifies as a TBS-and moving forward we would be measuring the percentage of our revenues that come from such solutions.

Keane is not only looking at growing in size but would also want to move up the value chain, make significant investments and tap some sensational projects. For e.g. The Melbourne Transportation bid, a half a billion US dollar project would completely redefine the way transit ticketing operates in Melbourne.

Keane has been a stable, operational excellence company and we would grow much more by offering TBS rather than just IT services.

"India an important destination"

We believe that India continues to be number one provider of talent and a dependable infrastructure-I agree there are gaps there, we still have challenges and miles to go but inspite of all that India continues to be the best outsourcing destination in the world.

On Application Outsourcing

Application Outsourcing, is a service offering that enables a customer to outsource maintenance as well as end-to-end application development to a vendor. Typically, once the contract is signed the customer gives full control of these applications to an outsourcing company like Keane. The contract is based on some kind of service level agreement and regardless of how many people you put on the task or the infrastructure that the vendor has to set up, it has to deliver on certain service levels based on the price and other terms and conditions. The service levels can be of the maintenance and production support type or development type.

During the transition phase the infrastructure as well as the connectivity are set up; the processes are defined; the knowledge transfer takes place; the project management framework as well the reporting framework is put in place. This typically takes from 8-12 weeks, the offshore team travels to the client's locations and brings knowledge of processes back and sets up an engagement model. After this phase the vendor has to start delivering service levels.

Challenges, not one, but many...

There are technology and connectivity challenges that one faces. On the connectivity side, it's not as simple as creating a pipe between the two locations, it's the physical connectivity, and it's the security access that needs to be given on the customer side of the house. Many customers have stringent security policies that need a lot of legal and information security review within their own business and many a times they are not even aware of it, as they have never considered outsourcing, so the contract gets signed without even thinking about these complexities and all of a sudden one discovers these issues. Issues like these can delay the project, you may have your entire team sitting idle at US waiting for clearance from the information security agencies, this can lead to a lot of money loss, as the project cannot kickstart till all one gets these clearance.

Global licensing is another big stumbling block, as it involves access of software between two countries; the customer may have to renegotiate the contract, causing a delay. Then there is something called the commerce control list in US, according to which regardless of what contract has been written, certain SW cannot be accessed from outside continental US because of homeland security issues. So a vendor needs to look at all the platforms used by the customers and see what all is on that list and suggest alternatives. And, if all this is discovered at the end of the game then both the customer as well as the vendor is stuck, there are delays, losses and a sour relationship. So it's the responsibility of the service provider, to play as a consultant and proactively educate its customer about these aspects and move ahead. This usually is done at the time of making the sale.

On the knowledge transfer side of the story, there are HR sensitivities involved because people are getting laid off in the US and one requires to take knowledge transfer from these very people -so change management is a big challenge here.

It is the service provider's responsibility to plan and outsource; have a 'cookbook' on outsourcing using which the customer should be educated. The companies that do a good job here get an edge over the others, and I think Keane is one of them. At Keane we have a dedicated transition team that engages with the customer in the sales cycle to make sure that both the sides are planning right before the relationship takes off.

"SW testing, not an IT issue"

SW testing is a commercial line of business with Keane; we have been doing SW testing for many years as part of our outsourcing framework because one cannot deliver outsourcing without having a testing methodology in place. Some time back, we extracted those best practices out of our outsourcing framework to spin-off independent testing, validation and verification offerings. Some trends have driven this-going back to 2000-2003, when the economy was in the dumps the first thing that got axed-off were IT costs, QA and support services was the first one to be hit in IT. In US, IT organisations have cut off their QA and support services to such an extent that building it back rapidly is a big challenge-making outsourcing the obvious choice.

Also, industry is moving towards more integrated but more distributed computing. SOA is opening up the difference between new and legacy systems, when all this is involved need for thorough testing becomes more complex. Under SOA, if a piece of functionality is exposed, how that piece of code may get used are plenty, it has multiplied a thousand times so the possibility of failure in the test scenarios have also multiplied those many times. According to me these two trends are driving the need for more robust testing processes.

Keane's point of view is testing is not an IT issue, it's a business issue. I was personally responsible for starting this line of business when I was in US, my study indicated that US economy spends 59 billion dollars every year in solving production defects and an average IT user spends atleast one hour every day with the helpdesk trying to fix a bug. So we firmly believe that testing is not a technology issue at all, it is purely a business issue, which may cause a loss money and more importantly reputation. The industry needs to put more robust QA frameworks in place, than we have today, to truly enhance end user experience.

Getting the right skillset in India is major challenge in all hot technologies. According to a Nasscom-McKenzie report, by 2010 there will be half a million shortage of skilled manpower. At KSE we have offer a very comprehensive program on SW testing and QA.

Competition

TCS, Wipro, Infosys, Cognizant on the Indian side, as well as international players like IBM Global Services, Singtel, EDS, CSC are on our list of competitors. Out of these there is clear demarcation between the pureplay Indian companies that have an excellent offshore delivery mechanism, however I think they face certain challenges in delivering to the customer needs as we move up the value chain. We believe we have a leg up with these companies because of our US heritage and also for our very strong program management model.

The international players, on the other hand have a very strong presence in the international market but are starting off operations in India. These companies are using India mainly as a back office and if one continues to use India as a back office in this age, one may not be able to leverage the full potential of the offshore model, as one may still have to have a strong onshore presence. I think, Keane is somewhere in the middle, we have been in India for 20 years, we have been in US for 40 years, and we are putting leadership in place. Richard Garnick, from Wipro joined as our US leader; my move to India after 10 years are all a part of the bigger program, wherein we would use India as co-front office without giving up our customer facing program in US.

"We would like to build a model of multiple career pathing"

Keane wants to be seen as the next generation services firm, and at its heart would lie a very forward thinking HR and employee policies and practices. We want to implement a model of multiple career pathing. When somebody joins Keane we would like to show him a 7-year career path with multiple career choices at different levels.

Today, when somebody joins a company as a developer, he moves up to be a project leader, then a project manager, and you would have to kill your boss to move forward. In US, however, things work very differently, a techie can go very far in his career without having to become a manager. My dream is to implement that kind of a model wherein people are given a chance to become thought leaders in their respective fields. Our employees would get multiple choices to choose from.

Secondly, if we are successful in getting truly TBS projects, it would generate a whole lot of more glamorous career opportunities for our employees. We would be truly talking about solution architecture from India; driving vertilcalized thought leadership from India; agile development from India. If we are able to land such projects people would join us for not only for money but for the career paths that we would offer them. We would make them global entities by offering global career pathing.

About Keane School of Excellence

We recruit engineers so far we have recruited only through are Keane School of Excellence (KSE). We run our own entrance exam, as past of our recruitment process. We have not yet recruited from campus, however this year we plan to go to other campuses for recruiting and by next year we would have a full-fledged campus recruitment process in place.

The graduates at KSE are trained on our technologies and methodologies on SW engineering. KSE is based out of Hyderabad with a satellite office here, but the think tank operates out of Hyderabad with affiliation with IIIT. We are expanding the presence of KSE across other cities in India like the NCRs but we would also actively take it to other cities. We fully expect that by the time we hit 10,000 we would be running full-fledged KSE's across 2-3 other cities in India.

"Keane is a company to watch for, we are going to go places"

January, 1, 2009, 10,000-15,000 headcount in India. Keane is already a household name in the industry, when kids graduate from high school to college, parents tell them to get a job in Keane. Our customers come to us not only for the size and low cost, but for the values we provide to them. Our employees especially our managers are performing truly global roles, to sum it all up I would say Keane is a company to watch for, we are going to go places.