SERVICINGTHROUGH RELATIONSHIPSSERVICINGTHROUGH RELATIONSHIPS

infogaininfogain

BUSINESS & TECHNOLOGY IN THE U.S. & INDIA APRIL - 2009 SILICONINDIA.COM

PUBLISHED SINCE 1997sil iconindiaEnterprise Security Special Company Spotlight: AgeTak Mentis Software

Kapil Nanda, President & CEO

Infogain’s President and CEO Kapil Nanda loves golden-haired English Setters. His pet Sketch isgentle and affectionate and reminds one of how Infogain treats its clients. And just as how EnglishSetters are known for their hunting abilities, Infogain has got its act right in spotting growth oppor-tunities and winning customers despite the slowdown. Infogain’s business from its top ten clientshas continued to grow since the beginning of the macroeconomic downturn. Also, the services

company headquartered in the Silicon Valley (Los Gatos, California) has not lost clients but instead itsclientele has grown to close to 100. And Nanda insists that the performance stellar, given the times we aregoing through has very little to do with the competitive rates Infogain offers its clients.

[ Cover Story ]

infogain

ServicingThrough Relationships

US based, Privately Owned

1000+ Employees in US, UK & India

Worldwide Presence and Delivery Capability

Sales Offices in Los Gatos (HQ), Irvine, Austin,

Dallas, London

Development Centers in India (New Delhi and

Pune)

Fortune 1000 Customers

Extended Enterprise Services

Product Engineering Services

Application Management Services

Partnerships with Technology Vendors

Referenced client Base

Industry focus on: Enterprise, Retai,l

Software services, Claims Management

State-of-the-Art Facilities & Infrastructure

CMM L5 Quality Certification

Ranked ‘Top 15 Exciting Emerging Companies

to Work for’

Quick Facts

Kapil Nanda

By Poonam Bhattacharya

www.infogain.com

The company’s mission statement, which says, “Ourgoal is to understand your business, share a common busi-ness goal with you, and help you reach your objectives. Wevalue the long-term relationship we create with our cus-tomers and ultimately become an extension of your busi-ness,” bears witness to Nanda’s opinion.

As a result of such ‘extensions of businesses’, Infogainacquired expertise in providing outsourced application man-agement; product development, application software im-plementation, and building integration solutions at clientcompanies. As their business widened and the India storystarted gaining ground around ten years ago, the companyopened its first delivery center in Noida in 1996. This wasfollowed by another development center in Pune, acquiredjust last year. It also has global footprints in the U.K. andthe Middle East.

Over the years, presence in multiple locations has be-come one of the key assets of the company. Unlike com-petitors in the services space, which have 99 percent of theirresources offshore in, say India, and one percent of the re-sources onsite in the U.S., Infogain’s presence is spreadmore equally. Prospective clients, therefore, are far less waryabout outsourcing critical components of their business toInfogain. “They don’t have to worry about which numberto call, and what time zone to adhere to. We are alwayswithin their reach,” reasons out Nanda.

Focus on RetailInfogain started focusing on retail as an area of ex-pertise about five years ago. What helped thecompany garner clients instantly was the pres-ence of industry veterans in its team. The storyabout how they joined Infogain is fascinat-ing.

Infogain’s Vice President and GeneralManager, Retail Business Practice, RayAllen, began his association with In-fogain as a satisfied customer with360Commerce. Ray, who was aVice President with Oracle afterit acquired 360Commerce, wasimpressed by Infogain’s ability

to add value to the client’s business. Since coming on boardInfogain, he has taken that philosophy forward. “When wetalk to clients, we talk not only about the project on the table,but also other areas of the business and the challenges theyface,” says Allen.

He says that their retail knowledge and experience withOracle Retail products help win trust and business from cus-tomers. “We have a unique capability to consult on retail

best practices as well as ability to leverage our advancedengineering skills when we work with clients. That puts

us in a unique position.”Nanda says that clients who are with Infogain

would probably need more than two vendors tomanage their business if they were not with Info-

gain.“For instance, large retail companies have

legacy solutions, and they try to extract max-imum value out of them. Making legacy

solutions work seamlessly with new sys-tems involves heavy integration work

and could be very difficult if one hasno background knowledge,” quips

Nanda. His company has, on sev-eral occasions, developed appli-

cations for legacy integration.

Instead, he attributes Infogain’s success to the relation-ship his company shares with the clients. Over the past 18years, Infogain has acquired customers through its perfectunderstanding of the business elements of its customers’products and their business landscape. Today, says Nanda,Infogain is what can be termed a development-to-deployment company.

“When we work with a client servicing a specific partof its business process, we try to understand the impact theprocess will have on the rest of the business. Based on that,we develop tools, deploy them, and integrate them with theother business systems in the company,” says Nanda, ex-plaining how his company is different from the services be-hemoths that restrict their presence to the specific projectsthey handle.

“We are a long-term partner, and our clients look at usthat way,” he says, describing the company he started in theearly ’90s.Infogain has built deep domain knowledge overthe years in four specific verticals: retail,the claims processing area of theinsurance industry, enter-prise, and independentsoftware vendors(ISV) and softwareas a service(SaaS) compa-nies. And un-derlining allits relation-ships hasbeen flexi-bility, com-m i t m e n t ,and mutualunderstand-ing.

Two WayCommunication“Getting started in engi-neering outsourcing was chal-lenging,” says Nanda. He started hiscompany in the ’90s, when competitors likeTCS, Infosys, and Wipro were courting big companiesin the U.S. with a value proposition based on economy.

“But we were dedicated to engineering. Weunderstood that companies tend to outsource

if it helps them increase their speed to mar-ket, not just because someone offers to do

the same thing at a lesser cost. Wewanted to win the trust of our clients

and build long-term rela-tionships,” says Nanda.

Database companieslike Informix, Sybase, Uni-fied, and Oracle wereamong Infogain’s earlyclients, and were followed

by the CRM companies likeSiebel, Clarify, and People-

Soft.“Working with these compa-

nies helped us understand theinner working of their products,

thereby deepening our knowledge. Wealso worked on implementations at end-

users of the products, and that broadened ourpicture,” says the CEO.

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“When we work with a client, servicing a specificpart of its business process, we try to under�stand the impact the process has on the rest ofthe business. Based on that, we develop tools,deploy them and integrate them with the otherbusiness systems in the company"

Infogain's dual-shore deliverymodel, says Eddie Chandhok, Pres-ident of Infogain’s Global Delivery,ensures more returns over thelong term.

“During discussions with cus-tomers, our thrust is not on cost,but on value,” says Chandhok. Thecompany places senior people,generally domain experts, on site;these experts interact with cus-tomers to understand their painpoints on a regular basis.

The forked approach has amultiplier effect, says Chandhok.And while it is easy to discount this as mere talk, he says that thecompany has data to prove the efficiency of the model.

In fact, measuring the RoI for customers is one of the key de-liverables of Infogain. This is done in two ways: measuring efficiencyin terms of mapping the time, money, and manpower devoted to aproject while the project is with Infogain and also while it is not. In-fogain’s RoI measurement also considers effectiveness, by mappingthe level of customer satisfaction.

Its India delivery center has solid experience with significant en-gineering programs, a seasoned engineering staff, and establishedprocesses, says Chandhok. Current productivity levels are deter-mined at the outset of each program, and they target achievementof higher levels within a six months period. Infogain's guarantee is a30 percent increase in productivity with equal or better productquality.

The Dualshore Model

People, processes, and technology make a product, but the mostimportant part of the equation is people. Eddie Chandhok, Presi-dent of Infogain’s Global Delivery, says that being self-driven andsmart with the right attitude are the ideal traits in a prospectiveemployee.

“One of our biggest accomplishments over the past couple ofyears has been upgrading our training programs. We now holdtraining assessment fairs focusing on a given technology. In the faira technical leader gives each employee a personal evaluation of anygaps between his or her skills and what the market is demandingtoday and what is needed to progress the employee’s career. Theemployee then signs up for training to put him or her on the cut-ting edge of technology, which is good for both the employee andInfogain.

“We would love to pack the entire team with super achiev-ers,” Chandhok says, “but that is never possible. We take peoplewith the right intrinsic characteristics, and with the right trainingmake them super achievers and thereby build high performanceteams.”At Infogain, employees become part of our global family. They haveaccess to global career opportunities with Infogain's presence inthe U.S., U.K., the Middle East, and India, and onsite opportunitiesto work with our clients across the globe.The 1,000-strong company has day care centers for its employees’children, and has a pro-active career development and mentoringsystem. These training programs differ from the ones that are of-fered by their competitors. While some competition may keep em-ployees in a given role for years on end to avoid ‘rocking the boat’,Infogain actually works together with its clients and jointly planscareer progression for Infogain team members.

People: The Super Achievers

Companies tend to outsource if it helps themimprove the time to market, not just becausesomeone offers to do the same thing at alesser cost

The company has a framework that allows adding modernstore system functionalities such as e-receipt to existinglegacy systems. Infogain counts several large retailersamong its clients. Nanda says the list includes ‘a $10 billionretailer with multiple brands’ and ‘a large electronics goodschain’.

But so do players like Infosys and Wipro, where’s thedifference between them and Infogain, one might ask?

Nanda is quick to answer. “They surely can, and docome in, as approved outsourcers of projects. But whenclients want specific point solutions, they look to commu-nicate with experts. Not only do we have experts who haveconsiderable experience of working in the retail space onboard, an added advantage with us is that clients do nothave to deal with a huge bureaucracy. CIOs are at easewhen working with us,” he claims.

Also, says Allen, Infogain helps clients deploy bestpractices from across theworld. For instance, whena retailer wanted to adopta new payment solution,Allen’s team first gavethem a lowdown of thedifferent payment optionsfrom across the globe: en-cryption system like theones used by Europeancompanies, debit facilityfrom Canada, chip systemfrom the U.K., et al. Allensays that his team hasoften enabled solutionsthat were not otherwisepresent in the U.S. mar-ket.

In addition, the com-pany also has deep ex-pertise in Oracle storesspace, merchandising,and integration of all thiswith middleware compo-nents. Some of its recentprojects in retail include

full implementations of Oracle Retail Suite, includingORPOS (Oracle Retail Point-of-Sale) and ORMS (OracleRetail Merchandising System). It has also recently imple-mented Retek in the front end and Oracle Financials in theback end, handling tricky integration issues and impress-ing observers in the industry.

Nanda offers a simple reasoning as to why retail has be-come one of the key growth areas for the company in recenttimes. “Most of the challenge for retailers is on the cus-

tomer transaction side, which are typically large projectsand also highly prone to risks. Our track record and thespectrum of work we have done in the space helps take therisk out,” he says.

Insurance, IncidentallyGlenn Gramling, Senior Vice President of Sales and Mar-keting, Infogain, says that the company entered the in-surance vertical incidentally through a client.

“A large insurance company brought us in to providethem with integration capability. In turn, we ended up ex-panding; leveraging our skill set in QA and testing. Wesubsequently extended our involvement to developmentand application management as well.

The breadth of experience of that encounter gave In-fogain in-depth knowledge about the insurance vertical.It has since built its strength in the claims processingarea, both in claims management product developmentand in providing services to claims management compa-nies.

“Claims processing might seem like a small and sim-ple thing, but it isn’t,” Nanda says. It involves paymentsto multiple claimants; also, fraud is a major concern. In-fogain’s past experience in other industries enables thecompany to provide data pattern recognition and frauddetection systems yielding an immediate RoI to claimsprocessors.

Infogain also offers other business intelligence solu-tions for claims processors. Many companies in thisspace are trying to understand what is happening, saysGramling. Insurance companies need business intelli-gence to understand their claims exposure and the pro-cessing time for claims. Such information help insurancecompanies understand their business better.

“Our clients have also rolled back portions of such cap-tured information to their clients, which in turn has madethe insurance company’s client relationships more robust,”opines Gramling.

Tech CompetenciesMost of Infogain’s early customers were in the databaseand CRM space, and a vast majority of them have sincebeen acquired by Oracle. The company therefore, by de-fault, is strongly aligned with Oracle’s tool set. This meansthat it is conversant with many of Oracle’s products, rang-ing from database to middleware to applications includingEBS, Peoplesoft, Siebel, and Oracle Retail.

The long association with Oracle has put Infogain in aunique position; this assumes more importance given Or-acle’s recent emphasis on Fusion middleware transition.“We are among the very few partners who transitionedfrom BEA to Oracle,” says Nanda.

Infogain is, as a result of its expertise in Oracle techstack, involved in identity management and master datamanagement along with BI for many of its clients. Info-gain has experience in Oracle’s BI product, OBIEE, andrecently hosted a BI forum to discuss and evaluate theproduct.

Over the years, Infogain has also built skill sets withSiebel, OnPremise, and SaaS versions. It has created serv-ices for the customer support area and, as Nanda says, isalso uniquely positioned to provide long-term applicationmanagement for the solutions.

“We provide performance management and long-termapplication support, along with deployment services,” hestresses. “Our flexi-model approach enables the customerto dynamically adjust his portfolio of app managementskills as his needs change.”

Weathering Rough windsThe honchos at Infogain say that the company is relativelydoing well in the face of the global economic downturn.This is more so because Infogain has kept up its strategy ofcustomer engagement, providing executive level attentionand responsiveness to changing customer needs even mid-stream in the service delivery process. The company haswon over tier1 competitors by combining this responsive-ness with its technical expertise, be it in technology area,business processes, or deployment, as the need may be.

In cases where the company approaches small tomedium sized firms, it brings the big-picture consultativeapproach on stream. In such arrangements Infogain fo-cuses on evaluating and providing a vision for the clients’evolving IT landscape, and Nanda says that Infogain beatscompetition in such cases on the basis of its ‘long-term’argument.

What has helped Infogain through the years, and in-creasingly now, is its forked presence, in the U.S. andIndia. Presence in the U.S. has helped mitigate a large partof the clients’ fears and win their trust, while the India con-nection has helped rope in a 1,000-strong talent pool whilekeeping the cost manageable.

Going ahead, Infogain seeks to align itself to changesin the technology cycle. It seeks to enhance its integrationtechnologies and evolve with Oracle’s technology direc-tion. Nanda also sees the company playing a big role atclients transitioning to Web 2.0, characterized by rich In-ternet apps and user experience.

Clients have also started looking at the pay-as-you-gomodel, and Nanda is mulling starting that service to boostcustomer numbers and trust. He also sees a lot of potentialspending in the healthcare segment, in terms of hospitalrecords and electronic data integration.

The economic downturn too has led to a new businessprospect, in a way, for Infogain. Clients are now lookingat SaaS, in effect migrating to new business models tosuit the economic condition. Nanda has his eyes set onthese waves; always a skillful player, he has his sail setfor a long haul. si

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Kapil Nanda moved to the U.S. in 1968 after his undergraduatestudies. He earned an MS at the University of Kansas, and thenhis MBA at the University of Southern California.

After graduating, he joined the Burroughs Corporation.Nanda joined Intel in 1974, when it was still a semicon-

ductor company. Through Nanda’s years in the company, theshift within Intel from a semiconductor company to a micro-processor firm happened. This gave Nanda exposure to the sys-tem side of the business, while architecting and programmingmicroprocessors.

Seven years into Nanda’s stint withIntel, another wave hit the industry; mi-croprocessor-based multi-user systemscame into being, andNanda played a hands-on role in the transition.

This gave him an idea about how sys-tems are constructed. Working with dy-namic people like Microsoft’s Bill Gateshelped, says Nanda. Intel was one of the earli-est customers of Microsoft Corporation.

In the ’90s, Nanda was calledupon by his friends to start a newbusiness. His interactions with VCswhile at Intel, and also his serving ina number of VCs as a limited part-ner, helped him figure out the avail-ability of funds. He gained anunderstanding of the market require-ments and plunged into starting Info-gain. In less than two decades, Infogainhas become one of the most admiredcompanies in the IT services world.

At the Helm of Affairs: Kapil Nanda

“We have an unique capa-bility to consult on bestpractices as well has abilityto leverage our advancedengineering skills when wework with clients. �at putsus in a unique position.”

Glenn Gramling