Criticality Comes into Aspect

There have been lots of debates and discussions across industries and verticals when it comes to choosing either a mid-sized/small service provider (the so-called boutique providers) or larger or giant players for outsourcing IT services. However, according to Zoeb Adenwala, CIO (global) of Essel Propack, the largest specialty packaging company, it has to be a case of mix-match and a case of best of both the worlds. Essel Propack being a manufacturing company is serious about its IT implementation and criticality of the project.

According to Adenwala, When it comes to the criticality of a project, we usually connect with the big players for our IT services contracts; while for mundane work, we reach out to tier-2 service providers as we believe that the quality and project methodologies are better when it comes to choosing a big IT service provider compared to boutique providers. Though we believe that when it comes to the cost of the project, boutique providers do have an edge over the larger players. However, in our case I think that it has to be a combination of both larger players for critical projects and taking services from boutique providers for non-critical projects.

Interestingly, Adenwala makes a point that there are several boutique providers that get absorbed by tier-1 players and therefore, the matter of trust and a long lasting relationship with a boutique provider also comes into question. Though he agrees that there are a few good boutique providers who can provide better services than larger players, but the fact is that innovation and talent usually come from the biggies as at one point of time, big players absorb the tier-2 players.

Being a manufacturing company, Essel Propack has a total of 8 IT personnels worldwide. Projects are outsourced in case of infrastructure and application projects, the company awards critical projects to giants while back-end support contracts and other mundane tasks are given to tier-2 or boutique providers. The company has already implemented a private cloud in its organization, while a state-of-the-art virtualization concept has also been deployed for its ERP (SAP) and Microsoft Windows applications.

The risk of things not working out is very high when it comes to boutique providers, but this is not the case with larger players. Hence, large enterprises opt for biggies while it is also true that when it comes to time, smaller and mid-sized service providers invest a lot of time in business. Hence, for any project to be successful, it has to be a mix-match of both biggies and boutique providers as suggested by Adenwala.