IT isn't about deal sizes: Collabera

You have been with Collabera a few months. How has the journey been?
Phenomenal so far. Collabera has access to customers that even top tier companies in India, or from anywhere in the world would die to have. Maintaining access to such customers, having credibility and then having an opportunity to bring a new IT architecture to the best organizations - I think it's phenomenal.

We work with 8 of top 10 banks, top 3 telecom companies, top 5 technology companies, the biggest retailers, and so on. That itself is a significant strength for the company. The technology transformation is going on right now. Customers are investing significant amount of money and are seeking more solutions.

What are your observations on client requirements?
Customers are demanding faster adoption of technology, new IT architecture. The IT services industry itself is taking a very different shape. 

Everyone wants to chase high growth and larger deals. Businesses in our key markets - North America particularly - are hungry to reduce their IT costs and at the same time, adopt new technology like social, mobility and cloud. However, the opportunity in these changes, i.e. the deal sizes, are not that large. A mobility deal is never going to be a $10 mn, it's always $200,000 to $300,000 dollars. Responsiveness and capability to build fast is what will get you such deals. These technologies require innovation closer to customers. A typical onsite-offshore model can give you development in mobility but not capability to innovate with the customer. We just started a development and design centre in New Jersey, and we are looking at starting another one in San Francisco. We are focused on supporting this demand from our customers around the new IT architecture, and that requires us to make investments not only in India and places close to our customers. We are aggressively hiring and building capability locally.

As a leader, what is the big change you brought to Collabera?
I came here to integrate the two businesses - Staffing & IT Services/Solutions. However, the market opportunity demanded something different and we decided to separate the two. Change requires us to have a matching culture and a different investment strategy. With this, I want to make sure our customers, who we acquired so diligently over the years, see Collabera not as an IT services firm, but as a firm that helps them adopt new technologies for better business impact.

What's the biggest challenge you faced with this change?
Implementing it was a challenge by itself. The biggest challenge is always about culture - I can put any strategy forward but if I don't have the right culture, mindset and people, it goes nowhere. I've been meeting many teams, and I've been working from ground level as we want to drive the grass root change.
For last decade or so, we have emulated a team-model similar to an Infosys or a TCS. It's a great model and has proven successful, but we need to consider a more entrepreneurial, tech-focused, innovation-centric strategy that requires us to measure ourselves differently. For instance, the leadership team will be promoted based on different metrics, and the HR policies would be different. It requires a complete rewiring of the system.

How does separating the two units affect Collabera?
Collabera has always tried to integrate IT staffing and IT solutions. Smart Computing Technology which was recently introduced will be a part of the IT solutions piece. This will allow customers adopt new IT and smart computing mush faster.

We decided to strategize and disconnect these two. Our IT staffing and IT services companies are input based - commercial construct and deliveries. With staffing and services together, the culture of input based models will continue to impact this new IT architecture. Separating them was a very big decision for us. First, we are disconnecting them operationally because that allows us to hire the right people and drive the right focus. Then comes putting together labs, design centers and so on. We are looking at acquisitions as well.

What gaps are you filling with acquisitions?
From a strategy perspective, it's going to be two-fold. One is, how do we get proximity to the business prophecy that we want to impact in the consumer-related industry. Secondly, how do we get capability that is more product-IT based. We want to get to a more product-based and IP-based presence in Philippines, Singapore, and Malaysia. About 55 percentage of our people are based in the US and about 35 percent are based here in India.

Where do you see most growth coming from?
From the markets perspective, we are largely focused on North America. Recently, we made an acquisition which had an SAP based product in India. This gave us access to over 300 customers in India. We haven't leveraged it yet as we are focused elsewhere.

We already have many customers in India, so the country is a natural progression of our focus as we go forward. We already see some traction in the Indian market. At this point in time, about 90 percent of the revenue comes from the US, and we want to change that to about 80 percent. About 5 percent of Collabera's revenue comes from India. UK is a huge focus area for us and we're growing there.

In India, which vertical do you focus on?
Our focus lies on consumer-oriented verticals and services for these. That's where we believe the transformation is taking shape. We focus on a set of verticals that have typical characteristics. Most of these verticals we operate in have consumer orientation. We look at telecom, banking, consumer technologies, retail, healthcare plans etc. which have a significant amount of information intensity.

BFSI is a very big area for us, apart from energy utilities and telecom. Media and entertainment again is a very consumer oriented vertical, followed by retail and CPG companies. We don't want to do business with government or in areas that are not consumer oriented.