Outsourcing: Vivek Chopra of Computer Sciences Corp. (Part 5)

By guest author Tony Scott

SaaS, the Cloud, and Changing Customer Expectations

Tony: How are your customers adapting to the world of SaaS and cloud computing? Are they asking for a different approach than what you have provided in the past?

Vivek: Customers are looking at from this way: “Can you take the application, take the infrastructure, deliver it to me, meet my SLAs and give me something for which you have determined a particular dollar outflow and tell me this is what I am going to get?”

Tony: Basically, customers are saying: “Tell me what I am going to get based on what I am going to spend.”

Vivek: Yes. At what price, and then it’s kind of a managed services piece – you take it end to end and deliver it to me at the end, whether you use fifty people or twenty people – I don’t care.

Tony: Or you use lots of people in other locations.

Vivek: You use people in the Philippines, or wherever. . .

Tony: But as the client, I don’t care. That’s not my problem. You deliver it for me, but you have to deliver.

Vivek: Right, you don’t care.

Tony: Of course, that’s ultimately what people want, is that kind of guarantee. They don’t really care what happens in the back room as long as it’s being delivered. And the cloud allows it to be delivered everywhere.

Vivek: So in the mix of this you have customers everywhere. Again, it’s the same rule. We have people working in Singapore and people working here in the United States. The client wants a certain outcome, they want a certain delivery in a certain period of time, and you have a team of people working here, you have a team of people working overseas.

Tony: Do you find that there are certain skill sets that are stronger than others in different regions? You have delivery capabilities across the globe. Are you creating concentrations of skill sets to give you a sort of virtual team-based world sourcing, where you have centers of capability on a geographical basis? Or are you trying to do it such that you have a broader range of skill sets in each of those locations?

Vivek: In Bulgaria, for example, we have strong expertise in financial services because we acquired a company that had product insurance banking expertise in Bulgaria. In Vietnam, we find very strong dot.net Microsoft capabilities. In China, we have a portfolio of services across J2EE, across Microsoft, some level of ERP and SAP-Oracle, too. In Prague, it’s largely applications; in Brazil, we acquired BearingPoints’s operations, which are largely SAP. So some of them are vertically based; others are horizontally based. In Eastern Europe, some of the places we have are supporting specific parts of specific industries. We have a BPO presence where we do vertical BPO, so there is a call center piece that comes with the BPO. In Eastern Europe, we have people who are multilingual. If you go to Prague, you will have employees who can speak French, Spanish, German, and English. So that skill-set benefit comes from Eastern Europe primarily, because that’s a place where we have multilingual capability. You may not get a significant cost arbitrage relative to India, China, and Vietnam, but you have people who can work in multiple languages.

Tony: But those different strengths have different values in the marketplace.

Vivek: And we do have different strengths, region to region. But the bigger objective when we do an outsourcing deal is to be able to provide infrastructure applications. To be able to deliver, you have to have strong governance that is valid across silos and multiple towers in a complex global demand context. We have tools, processes, and frameworks which provide the customer with a seamless feel. We have a center in Bulgaria, one in India, and another in the United States, but on the dashboards the customer sees, the performance is seamless. If a customer walks into one of our Indian centers, or to one in Bulgaria, and the look and feel to the customer are just the same. Having a strong governance process for securing your data will do that. Clients have to know that their information is secure with us and that we deliver according to our commitment.

It’s those three or four building blocks on which we have built our global strategy from an outsourcing perspective. I believe we will be clearly differentiated from the Wipros and the Infosyses. Compared to IBM or HP, the other thing that comes out is that we are product agnostic; we don’t bundle hardware and software. We have our partners: Dell on one side, Cisco on another, Microsoft on another, and Google on yet another. Now on the cloud side, we have Microsoft with us on one part of the business, Google is working with us on the other. I believe we have the best of the alliances which we leverage without getting tied up with any one specific product or offering.

Tony: That’s always been the issue with companies. In a product company there is a certain point at which you have to decide if you are really going to be in the service business or not. If so, you have to be more agnostic about what’s going to be the best overall solution for your customer, not take the approach of “how can I make my product fit, even if it isn’t the ideal solution for the customer.”

This segment is part 5 in the series : Outsourcing: Vivek Chopra of Computer Sciences Corp.
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