Outsourcing: Lalit Dhingra, President Of NIIT Technologies (Part 2)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Aditya Modi

Sramana Mitra: So, fifteen to 20% of the new hires every year for NIIT come out of this GNIIT program?

Lalit Dhingra: The GNIIT, or wherever we do training for NIIT.

SM: How many graduates does NIIT’s GNIIT program produce every year?

LD: There are 2,000 training centers in India, franchise training centers from NIIT, so 15,000 to 20,000 people may come out every year. We don’t take all of them, but I think that is the number to date.

SM: Fifteen thousand to 20,000, but not all of them are doing the GNIIT program, right?

LD: Yes. Some do it; some don’t do it; some finish it; some still take it over a longer period. If we are taking 500 or 600 people, we will defnitely take around 10% to 15% from our own schools. But when we take them, they are the best people, the ones whom we believe will stick around longer with the company than anybody else.

SM: What is the differentiation you have when you are working on these outsourcing projects around the world, in North America, Europe, and Asia?

LD: The first thing you must know is that we are, compared to other outsourcing companies, focused on only a few verticals. Once we start working on the verticals in which we want to grow, we take the approach of focusing and differentiating ourselves. If we work on similar things for two clients, we can create very good domain knowledge. We can hire and invest in those verticals to create a framework or intellectual property (IP) that is used for better, more productive results. Our philosophy of focus and differentiate is the key difference between us and some others.

SM: Give me a use case. Let’s say in the finance vertical, what would be some differentiated IP, tools, or processes, that you have created that make you different?

LD: Let’s take an example like a bank management system. We are looking for more than two or three clients. Now, we have understood what is needed for the industry, so we have created tools and frameworks that are used by these clients to get better results from what we are doing. I can deliver these tools to them much faster than anybody else can because I understand investment banking or wealth management, I have good domain capability, and I have the framework. The client is going to look at it and say, We can now work at a faster rate and be more productive; we can get those customers to market faster; and we get traction better than somebody else who is doing 20 things in 20 verticals.

I will give you another example. Since you brought up finance, I will give the example of airline ticketing. You buy your tickets from the Web, say from Delta or United or anybody else. There are certain applications that are written to handle this process. When we got this project from Virgin, Virgin was worried that they would not be able to fly if we didn’t have the system up and running in six months. There was nobody in the industry who was able to give it to them in six months at the at which cost they wanted it. We said, because we know, understand, and have the framework, we can deliver it much faster than six months. We delivered the system in record time – in four and a half months. That is the difference between understanding the domain, working on the same thing again and again, and building a framework and tools that can help.

SM: I understand the benefits of having a framework. I am trying to understand what that framework is. You jumped from finance to travel. Let’s stay with travel; when you got the Virgin project, what other airline clients had you worked with before that?

LD: We worked with Emirates, Travelocity, British Airways, and Hawaiian. We work with Yatra.com.

SM: Specifically, when it comes to framework, what is it that you have knowledge of? Is it data structure? What are those frameworks?

LD: It is not about IT; it is all about business. That is the difference. Everybody is just stuck on IT. What are the frameworks? Whatever a physical framework means. You see, it means that I understand how an airline website works inside and out. That is the domain. If I know that, then, obviously, while there may be somebody else who can come up with a new thing, we can come up with it much faster. We have not touched most airlines’ websites. It is not the website we are concerned with. It is basically one of the applications running behind it. So, if somebody says, OK what is there in the airline ticketing? What does the process entail? We understand it very well. How does the flow of ticketing work? We know, and that helps us. That is the business framework which I am talking about. A physical IT framework is just a tool. I can build any tool on any business framework, but if I don’t understand the business, I can’t build anything.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Outsourcing: Lalit Dhingra, President Of NIIT Technologies
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