Outsourcing: LN Balaji, President of ITC Infotech (Part 2)

SM: What segment do you have that relationship in?

LNB: All of our development for the one software product company I mentioned is in the CRM space around Siebel.

SM: But CRM is horizontal. There is no vertical on top of the horizontal.

LNB: We don’t do it for all verticals. We do it for three of the verticals. One is retail and life sciences. The other one is airline. The third is consumer products. The thing we implemented at the soft drink company was actually a core innovation between ITC Infotech and another software product company for supply chain and performance management. It’s a module that sits on top of the APO module and that helps unravel complex supply chains in a manner that can be optimized.

SM: All right. Let me ask you a few questions to get the rest of the context framed. One of them is give me a geographical overview of your business both from a where are the customers point of view and also from your delivery of operation point of view.

LNB: ITC Infotech began in the UK and then moved to the Americas. Today, if you look at our geographical spread of customers, about 40% of the revenues would be from the Americas, about 50% from the UK and [continental Europe], and the balance is India and Asia. Asia-Pac is a very new thing for us. India constitutes the rest. Within the Americas it’s almost dominated by the United States. But we also have clients in Canada, Mexico, Chile and the Dominican Republic. Our development centers in the US are in Bentonville, Ark. It happens to be the headquarters for Wal-Mart. It’s a low cost center. We have offices in San Jose, Paramus, which is the headquarters, and we have a development center in the outskirts of Boston. In the UK, we have it in Milton Keynes, which is about a mile and a half drive away from London. We have centers in Denmark. Within India, our delivery centers are in Bangalore, Kolkata, Pune and one more in the offing in Trivandrum, which is not yet open, but we’ll announce it shortly.

SM: In terms of people, is Bangalore your largest center?

LNB: Yes. We have a 35 acre campus in the heart of Bangalore, which is a pretty powerful value proposition for employees based in Bangalore.

SM: How so?

LNB: It used to be a factory. That moved out. It’s a 100-year-old campus, which was featured in the New York Times a few years ago. It’s unlike any IT campus that you would see.

SM: What’s special about it?

LNB: Like I told you, it’s a 100-year-old campus. There are trees that are at least 100 years old. We’ve retained that atmosphere. Many of the buildings, the outer shells, have been retained. Obviously, inside we brought it up to all the standards that are required for us to provide our services. It’s very green, almost like going to college.

SM: Are there residences also, or is it only a corporate campus?

LNB: This campus is only a delivery and global headquarters. Residences are given to some of our management. That is closer to the new airport.

SM: And how many people in Bangalore?

LNB: About 4,000.

SM: And how many in Kolkata and Pune?

LNB: Kolkata would be about 500. Pune is new, and it is dedicated to a special service line, which is product lifecycle management (PLM). That’s new and will scale up.

SM: How many do you have in America?

LNB: It’s about a 100 seater in Arkansas.

SM: Let’s talk about outlook. Where do you see, since you brought up Arkansas – this is a very top-of-mind question for a lot of Americans right now, jobs – is ITC playing a role? One hundred is relatively small. Is there an outlook for ITC to expand in America?

LNB: We have about 350 of our people working in the United States, 76% of whom have been recruited in the United States. So, it’s small, depending on how you look at it, but that’s what ITC Infotech is. To be honest, we don’t care where we need to deliver our services from. It depends upon two or three things. Number one, it depends upon the strategic outlook of our clients. Number two, it depends upon our clients’ risk management outlook and their risk management appetite. Third, it depends upon what kind of budgets and cost outlays they are prepared to set aside for these services. Based on this, if they decide that services have to be rendered in the United States, so be it. If they decide that services have to be rendered in South Africa, so be it. We’re not hung up on where we deliver our services from. In that sense, we practice the global delivery model. If it has to be done through a combination of on-site and offshore, which is the most common model, we are up to that as well.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Outsourcing: LN Balaji, President of ITC Infotech
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