July - 2003 issue > On The Cover

By Karthik Sundaram

In the 1850s, the booming railroad industry was facing severe shortage in manpower. The U.S. opened doors to Chinese immigrants, laborers who were glad to escape the stifling dragonland. The immigrants worked hard, accepted low wages and made no unionized demands. More than a century later, short-sighted coding was threatening to hold the world to ransom. To clean up the millions of code before the Y2K bug could hurt industry, the U.S. again welcomed immigrants. This time around, the Indians came. And the IT services industry was born.

As the Internet and software industry boomed, IT services industry grew many fold to become the largest export entity for India. Pure body shopping and staffing was an even bigger business, generating immediate revenues. A slew of Indian companies launched IPOs in India and ADRs in the U.S., and the golden era of IT enabled services (ITES) was at its height.

Even as the U.S. went into recession from the mid-2001, the ITES industry has posted some healthy growth. But the effects of the recession are seen in many forms—offshore development centers, reduction in cost-per-seat and overall IT budgets, and premature cancellation of projects. To compete with these downturns, the ITES industry had to reinvent itself. While in the beginning, the players simply rode the momentum and had no viable differentiation—often ridiculed as just another “vanilla flavored” services company—the need of the hour has been to become really a beneficial partner to the client.

IP Differentiates
“Point of view marketing is important when you want to play to win,” says Girish Gaitonde. In a market flooded with players of different hues, sizes and shapes, it is important to derive a point of view—how do you want to focus and how do you deliver this focus to the client, says the CEO of Xoriant. “We adopted a point of view that we will build our business based on the intellectual property that we own and build.” Secondly, says Gaitonde, Xoriant focuses on five core industries and develops in-depth horizontal and vertical process knowledge in these five. “I don’t want to be everything to everybody. We remain focused within the areas of financial services, high tech, telecom, healthcare and government. There is sufficient room for growth in just these five areas, as long as we deliver on our IP and widen our IP portfolio.”

Gaitonde speaks with over a decade of experience. Founded in 1990, Xoriant has built a successful business by focusing on IT staffing and delivering turnkey projects for Global 2000 companies. “From over thirteen years of experience, we have developed some key bridge technologies which close the gap between the packaged software and the free software,” says the CEO. “Many clients—and consequently their services partners—have refrained from experimenting with free software like Linux. While the potential of these free software is tempting, the lack of a support system is a frightening sequel.” The gaps existing at data level, intelligence level and business process levels are some of the areas Xoriant has been attempting to close, delivering actionable information to the decision making entities within the enterprise. “These services can be possible only if you have enough depth in your intellectual property,” cautions Gaitonde.

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