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High-end Delivery

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DQI Bureau
New Update

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

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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

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