Striving to be an INDIAN ITSM Gorilla in the Global Market Date:   Wednesday , August 01, 2012 Satish Kumar's office is bustling with activities. As the captain of GLOPORE IMS, a pure-play IT Infrastructure and Service Management (IMS/ITSM) company with its presence in tier I, II and III cities in India, and with global presence in UK and the U.S., the man with vision has made brilliant plans to capture the Indian and global IMS market. As long term outcome based strategic business partners, GLOPORE IMS delivers ITSM Excellence through Managed IT Services, Remote Technical Support Services, Transformation Consulting & Training Services, IT Infrastructure & Technology Solutions and Service Management Consulting Solutions to its customers, globally. Infrastructure management is a critical function where even minutes of downtime can cripple a client's business. Still, due to the high level of expertise, time and cost involved, companies are ready to selectively source this from independent vendors to manage it for them. The IMS market which was at $1 billion in 2011, is undergoing a sea change and we are witnessing a new decade of strategic shift for IT services organizations from being a 'one factory, one customer' model to a 'one factory, all customers' model. Today customers do not have a problem working with service providers who are strategically working with their competitors. This comfort zone between companies is observed by GLOPORE IMS and Kumar tends to use this technique as their key shared services value proposition in the coming years to deliver cost effectively. This has in fact helped the company gain multiple customers in the last fiscal year. Two years back it was considered as a challenge and now things seemed to have changed with proven highly matured chinese wall insulated shared services hybrid delivery models. The challenge has been well addressed where the comfort zone has been achieved. Hence, the shared service model is the new trend that the industry is following and GLOPORE IMS has been able to break through the competitors. The dearth and opportunity Back in 2005, when Satish Kumar was still working for a multinational company, headquartered in the U.S., he found the growth opportunity in IMS. After an in-depth discussion with several industry experts and veterans, he returned back to India for good to incorporate GLOPORE IMS along with Ashwini SKumar and Dr. Srinivasa Rangan and incubated from IIM, Bangalore-NSRCEL. Satish Kumar is the Chairman & CEO of the company whereas Ashwini SKumar and Dr. Srinivasa Rangan are the co-founders and Directors of the organization. It is the first company in India certified by BSI for ISO/IEC 20000:2011, leading Managed IT Services provider, with a strong market leadership established in the Education segment as their ICT Managed IT Services outcome based business growth partner. It has been a preferred partner for Fortune 500 companies for their ITSM transformation needs. This medium sized, fast growing company has been identified as an exceedingly efficient entrepreneurial & agile ITSM partner irrespective of the vertical or size of the business. GLOPORE IMS is led by a visionary ITSM leadership team and has employee strength of 450 GLOPORIANS spread across tier I, tier II, tier III, and tier IV cities in India. GLOPORE IMS' consultative and collaborative approach enables its customers to improve the quality of service provided to their end customers/users, suppliers, employees, partners and stake holders. By benchmarking the global maturity, ISO standards & ITSM best practices, the resultant changes improved the measurable business results in areas of like strategizing, planning, transformation, operations and continuous improvement which required highly mature ITSM capabilities. For instance, Pearson Education Services, a provider of end to end education solution provider in the k-12 segment across the country were looking for partners who had extensive skills in this area, they forged customer service centric partnership with GLOPORE IMS considering the strategic, tactical, operations and execution capability. "The advanced level of planning GLOPORE IMS uses and the network reach, which GLOPORE IMS continues to provide is impressive. Moreover, the transparency which is critical for our business, GLOPORE IMS made things easy for us. GLOPORE IMS' online Management Information System (MIS) dashboard providing visibility to operational data and business intelligence analytics which can be viewed by the management team, sales can be updated on a real time basis on the status of every single activity that is happening on the field across the country. This makes GLOPORE IMS very different from their competitors," says Srikanth Iyer, COO, Pearson Education Services. Challenges and peripherals GLOPORE IMS never believed in being a 'Me Too' kind of organization and try to succeed with a trial and error method, rather they prefer to be the mini McKinsey & Company of the IMS Industry, by engaging with the CXOs right from the business strategy, integration of IT strategy requirement tracking stage and understanding the client's end to end current business status, end key result areas and best approach to achieve them. GLOPORE IMS helps customers to focus on their core business and achieve their business objectives through IT Service Management Excellence. Using a selective sourcing model, it enables companies to retain control over strategic IT functions while they selectively source multi-year Managed IT Services from GLOPORE IMS through well defined outcome based Service Level Agreements (SLA) in alignment with their business objectives. Today this is what lacks in many of their competitors. For instance, GLOPORE IMS recently partnered with a tier I company which is a kind vendor to a 250 people KPO that is into business analytics. The hourly rate was around $40 to $50 by working for their global customers. GLOPORE IMS was surprised to see a huge difference in the actual total cost of ownership (TCO) when an initial audit was conducted on the current operations. It was shocking to see the company paying almost Rs.4.5 crores which included an indirect cost while the assumed actual cost being Rs 20 lakhs, which was only direct cost. The company took this opportunity as their highlight and owned it. GLOPORE IMS promised their customer an 88 percent reduction in the TCO within 6 months for service delivery engagement. "This is just not one case, there are 1000+ SMEs and Mid-Market companies in a similar state and we are keen to help them to be their true outcome partner. GLOPORE IMS is going to be very disruptive in the market, exposing the total cost of ownership and help the customers to maximize their business performance," confidently says Kumar. This confidence in Kumar has helped him to win bunch of top notch companies in India and international markets. The journey and the business model The story of GLOPORE IMS is little different from other organizations in the league. It began its functioning by serving the domestic market with its outcome based model and cost leadership through shared service model, process & operational excellence. The company's strategy worked in their favor. It provided GLOPORE IMS with the pan-India footprint & platform to quickly ramp up and mature its mix of ITSM service offerings and achieve the growth it has accomplished today. The other part of the strategy is the conscious decision to remain a pure play IMS/ITSM company. Today, in most IT services companies, IMS, though large, is one of the many services they offer for their clients as their portfolio effect and many trade-offs to make which might not be in the best interest of customers and end users. This makes the ability to work with partners very limited as at some point the partners in IMS tend to become competitors in another service area, creating hard-to-manage competition-co-operation tension. IMS is an offering that is replicated across different businesses by various vendors. By being a pure play IMS company, GLOPORE IMS focused on creating a scalable highly matured delivery engine and extending it to the ecosystem. With its global command center, the company has achieved both ITSM ISO/IEC 20000:2011 & ISMS ISO/IEC 27001:2005 certifications. Leveraging on Strengths As IT, consumer electronics and computer systems become more pervasive in our lives and increasingly complex to use, many consumers face challenges while installing, operating, maintaining, and repairing products within these categories. GLOPORE IMS having seen its strengths in dealing with the enterprise customers since its inception in 2005, Kumar envisions exploring and serving the end consumers in India. With a dynamic vision to serve the consumers, the company clearly understands the mistakes made by the big players in the game and prevents itself from directly going to the consumers and prefer going through value chain partners. "We have a clear strategy for going to market for consumers. We are aware of the mistakes, from which the global players have learnt and that is why we are going to be localizing to the dynamics in India market and we are going to play safely. For us, this is going to be leveraging our existing strengths and investments already made serving businesses and we are actually doing full leverage game taking this to the consumer business," says Ashwini SKumar, COO, GLOPORE IMS. GLOPORE IMS believes that the kind of market they are targeting might be niche and will grow in the coming years. "We can expect the same growth which we have seen in the western countries. Twenty percent of the Indian market is a big enough market and it amounts to the size of Germany and France put together," explains R.P Singh, Director of Sales and Marketing, GLOPORE IMS. Understanding the crucial aspect of the market, and finding a vacuum in the market that is not yet ready, GLOPORE IMS is trying to leverage this opportunity by looking at the household PC, Laptop and internet penetration. "There is a growing need and willingness to pay for Service Lifecycle management, however I think there is an ecosystem that needs to be prepared. Creating the market and capturing it together is an important part of our strategy that we look forward to do so this year," adds Kumar. The Road Ahead Since its founding, GLOPORE IMS has been enjoying a healthy streak of growth but now with the expanding global foot-print, the company hopes to grow by 3-4 times year-on-year. "By 2012-13 we hope to be the chosen IT Service Management partner for 250 global customers and be among the top 10 global IMS companies by 2015," envisions Kumar. With GLOPORE IMS growing by leaps and bounds both in terms of customer and partners, it envisions to be an India Gorilla in the global IMS space. GLOPORE IMS strongly believes in building a healthy ecosystem. It is a matter of great feat for GLOPORE IMS that a majority of the company’s customers will experience their services even in Tier-III and IV cities. "You can see a end user/consuler of IT sitting at Ladakh or Kanyakumari experiencing our service in the coming days delivered by GLOPORIANS," quips Kumar. With their plans to expand their employee strength from 400 to 1500 by March 2013, the job creation opportunity will happen more in the tier III and IV cities. As a part of their strategy, the company is in a mission to focus more on these tier III and IV cities where there is a future demand for IT Service Support services. Also the company is in the process of empowering youth and give them the employment opportunities in these cities too. At the rate at which the IMS space has grown in the last three years, it is critical that there is a pool of skilled resources available in the years ahead, not only for the company itself but for other players in the space as well. To achieve this, GLOPORE IMS has been working with several tier II & III degree colleges to empower young and dynamic graduates through its "IMS Gurukul" programs to transform them into professional IMS experts and create employment opportunities for them. The company is trying to empower such people so that they don't have to move to metros or tier-1 cities but continue the social value of being with parents and family in their own cities, and cost effectively earn and save along with being a part for adding value to their local ecosystem in their tier III and IV cities.