Outsourcing: Raju Reddy, Chairman And CEO Of Sierra Atlantic (Part 4)

By guest author Tony Scott

The Cloud-Enabled, Flattening World

Tony: So, let’s talk about this whole movement to the cloud. How does that impact you and enable you to provide services or technology in a different way from competitors, and what kind of people do you need to be effective in doing that?

Raju: A lot of the work that we are doing for our customers is in the area of SaaS enabling. I am still learning this space, to be honest with you, and in this sense I am probably not be very different from a lot of other CEOs out there. But most of the time it quickly translates to making your applications SaaS. That’s really where Salesforce is often highlighted as the best example of the cloud, and such an approach is mostly what we are doing in this space. The Oracle ecosystem is not very different from what we were doing in the past.

Tony: Right.

Raju: But at some point, I suppose, as these applications are delivered like Oracle on demand, they will change the way we approach the market. To a large extent, that has not changed what we do here.

In a related thought, I don’t want to suggest that all of our differentiators have to be purely in terms of being technology enabled. I think we are at a point at which given our size and scale, we definitely need to look at it more in terms of greater domain expertise in certain verticals. And one that really stands out for us is banking, which we already talked about. Not broad financial services, but banking.

Another area within outsourced product development that we were just reviewing at my executive staff meeting today is gaming. Console and Internet gaming development. One thing interesting here is that plenty of leading networks in this space are developing outside of the United States. There is a lot happening in China.

Tony: Yes, a lot in China, and in Korea.

Raju: So we have a development center in China, and that opens up interesting avenues for us. Even in India now it is starting to happen. The other areas that are interesting to me are  manufacturing and life sciences. We believe that in some of these segments we have deep domain expertise. We feel this is really the foundation on which we can now scale the business from a $100 million to become, I hope, a $500 million company over the next few years. But again, it comes from taking some technology differentiators and bringing some domain expertise together, just as we are doing with BankOn. We can try to solve the problem purely with a technology approach, but we really need people with a strong banking background to provide not only the right technology but a truly superior solution.

But again, the interesting angle here is that China and India play. know that’s one of the components that you talk about in your writings. To the best of my knowledge, we were really the first outsourcing company to have global delivery centers in both China and India. We have been in China for almost three years now.  That came through an acquisition, and the company we acquired has been operating in China for six years now. We have a very good management team there.

I touch upon that because you mentioned the increasing globalization of the outsourcing business in your writings.  I think to some extent many of these IT services companies or either too Indian centric or too China centric. It’s my view that some of the things that we take for granted here in Silicon Valley are a huge advantage. We are much more comfortable operating in a more globalized world, because a typical Silicon Valley meeting includes people from all over the world sitting at the table.

So, I think we have a distinct advantage in harnessing that experience and culture, the Silicon Valley or the Western management culture.  Time will tell how successful it’s going to be.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Outsourcing: Raju Reddy, Chairman And CEO Of Sierra Atlantic
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