'We like a little pain'

Indian service firms have grown doing consulting.

What's your positioning vis-a-vis such companies?



The company has taken dramatic turns in the last 15 years of its existence.

In early nineties, we were known as a client-server firm. And when the Web

happened in 1998, people said Sapient would never get the Web. A lot of our

competitors from back then have disappeared. We took a decision to make software

development out of India. More importantly, we would look at our Indian

operation not as an ODC but as an equal office to any other office around the

world. It is focusing on who we are and how we do things and not what we do.

Indian firms have been there from a long time. It's a big market. We are

aiming to grow big, but size is not the primary driver that makes sense. We want

to maintain our culture that is very different. It is different in a way that it

delivers more value to clients. Indian firms are formidable competitors. We have

never gauged our success by overtaking competitors. We have gauged our success

by competing with ourselves.

If India is on an equal level, don't you leverage on

cost arbitrage?



Over 50% of our workforce is in India now. Yes, we leverage that. But we

don't leverage to the extent that Indian folks disappear in the back. We

encourage our clients to visit India. We want them to know how it works. We

leverage cost arbitrage but do it in a way that is consistent with our culture

that brings folks in our India operations involved as early as business

development, which is a big deal.

It is usually painful for MNCs that go in for a globally

distributed model. What was your experience?



The good news is that we like a little pain. Sapient started as a company

that was committed to fixed time, fixed price. This was the time when a vast

majority of work was taking time and material and ran over budget, deadlines

consistently. Not only did we have the marketing message, we actually delivered

on that message 83% of the times. It was painful to do. People told us that it

was impossible to have a company that can do that. It was a question of mindset.

We became public that added more pressure. When Internet came along, we added

more capabilities, business consulting, creative design. Add to this the

globally distributed model. In 1996, we picked a big systems project from one of

the top global ISPs in the world. The CIO looked at the proposal and said, he

likes fixed time fixed price, but was not prepared to pay the rates for our

developers. It took us a good year and a half to just get it working. We now try

to combine three things most people would never like to combine. These are

continuing to do globally distributed delivery on a method that is CMMI

accessible, and on a methodology that is agile.

Goutam Das