Sapient was started in 1991, and since, the company’s revenues have grown
to over $500 million. Though 2001 was a difficult year, Sapient managed to
recover with a fixed-price and fixed-time model of delivery. According to Stuart
Moore, co-founder and co-CEO of Sapient, Indian companies must start delivering
high-end strategic consulting, rather than remain at the low-end and
volume-based value chain
l What is
giving you an edge over bigwigs like IBM and Accenture?
Sapient is into both business and technological consultancy covering
application integration, business strategy creation, and enterprise learning
etc. We have a rich methodology in place that gives us an edge in understanding
and identifying the business requirements of our clients- its named the global
distributed delivery method. This method has helped us reach our clients faster
and delivery solutions with success rates of 90% on-time delivery. This fixed
price and fixed time model has given us a lot of edge and this is working better
for us, as we are now able to handle over 50 clients in 18 months, on the
average. Some of Sapients’ global clients are American Airlines, Lucent,
Hallmark Cards, and BEA Systems, part of whose work is carried out in India.
l Sapient
relocated several employees to India at a time when it laid of 14% of its
taskforce in the US. How well is India positioned as far as high end strategic
consulting is concerned?
The increase in IT spending in the coming months will benefit India. 50% of
Sapients’ high-end work is done in India including design and implementation.
This is where Indian companies need to concentrate in–high end strategic
consulting. Sapient has 14 offices globally, of which the Indian office is the
only extension the company has in Asia. India emerged as the choice for
expansion outside of North America and Europe because of its existing high
quality educational institutions, besides seeing benefits for businesses that
accrue from the distributed delivery paradigm.
l What must
Indian companies leverage on to get into high-end strategic work?
People are not getting business value from their IT spending. Pricing and
technical quality. Are the only two driving forces for demand today. Indians
must focus on high-end strategic work and consulting and thus offer more value
in their product offerings. Ever since IT spending budgets have been down CIOs
have been looking for high value at reasonable costs. Indian companies must
shift from a dollar per hour or volume based model of revenue to a higher rung
up the value chain.
Radhika Bhuyan in New Delhi