Outsourcing: LN Balaji, President of ITC Infotech (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Because of the analytics talent?

LN Balaji: Yes, it’s a little bit high end. You don’t have to be high end all the time. When it was developed, we did it that way, and we did it out of Calcutta. This is maybe a five- or seven-year-old engagement. We still maintain it out of our development center in Calcutta.

SM: Are there any other hot buttons or core competencies in Calcutta, besides analytics?

LNB: The other thing is we can use ITC, our parent, as a lab – if I may say so. Some of the cutting-edge technologies that are coming out can be implemented, tested out in ITC. That in turn helps ITC Infotech strengthen its solution capability. That is one advantage that we have by virtue of the fact that our parent is headquartered in Calcutta.

SM: You said you are incubating media and entertainment.

LNB: Now it’s a pretty large practice for us. About 18% or 19% of my deals’ revenues are from media and entertainment.

SM: Talk to me more about what kinds of clients you work with and what kinds of projects you do in media and entertainment.

LNB: There are two types of clients. One is the new media companies like the Viacoms, the MSNs, those kinds of companies. The other is online service providers, particularly, online education. What kind of work do we do for them? We help both on the development side and on the quality assurance (QA) side. We also do a bit of infrastructure work, but infrastructure is largely domain independent. For example, if you’re doing a Windows server upgrade, it doesn’t vary much based on the industry you serve. For development and QA, we need to be domain focused. That’s the kind of work we do for these companies.

SM: Do you do software development, or are you also involved in content projects?

LNB: When we say content, there is one client we advised right from the start on what their content strategy should be. This is a client that was finding it difficult to manage the transition from non-digitized forms of content to digitized content. We advised them on how they should go about their entire media strategy. We helped them choose the technology and implement it. Phase 1 of the transformation is over, and as we speak, we’re into Phase 2, including long-tail marketing and all of that. It is a mid-size publishing company that wanted to transform itself. We do help them on the content side as well … not in generating the content. That’s not our business.

We have our own IP for a tool, which is a very clever tool. It helps embed metadata into digital assets in a manner that the underlying asset and the metadata are never separated. For example, say a consumer products company is sharing some of its parts for an ad campaign with an ad agency. Very often, you’ll find that the digital asset sides in one repository – usually a digital asset management system or an equivalent system. The metadata will [reside] elsewhere, and these are relationally linked. Often, when you share with entities outside of your company, the link between the metadata and the underlying assets gets lost. What we do is we help design the metadata, the taxonomy, the architecture of it. This tool automates it so well that all kinds of layers of metadata are embedded in the digital asset itself. It helps in multifaceted search, for example. It helps in your revenue management system. That’s the nature of the work we do for media companies.

SM: OK.

LNB: We have an offshore development center for the world’s largest university.

SM: All right. Is there any other area we should touch on in this story?

LNB: I just wanted to touch upon one more thing, and pick your brains a little bit. What are you seeing in terms of outsourcing trends? Are you seeing a decided trend toward nearshoring?

SM: We are seeing nearshoring trends, and I think there is quite a bit of stuff going on onshore in the United States. There is – as they call it – the “Third World United States.” There are lots of states where you can get talent, and the advantage of the United States’ education system is that there are very good universities all through the heartland of the country.

LNB: Quite right.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Outsourcing: LN Balaji, President of ITC Infotech
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