Cybage: Pursuit of excellence Date:   Monday , March 07, 2011 IT outsourcing decisions are usually board room decisions. Given the highly strategic nature of such decisions, the stakes involved in them are quite high. As soon as an organization takes a business decision to outsource, it exposes itself to different kinds of risk avenues such as scalability risk, management risk, and schedule risk, among others. Also, the amount of cost savings that an outsourcing initiative is expected to bring is a critical point of analysis that triggers a question—What rates are the right rates at which an organization can outsource? Keeping in mind some of these fundamental business decision-making challenges that organizations at large have about outsourcing, Cybage nurtured an organic thought leadership to take the challenges head on. Cybage manifests this industry thought leadership through a sophisticated IT-driven model of operational excellence, called the ExcelShore model. The word ExcelShore implies ‘excellence in offshore’ outsourcing. This model delivers tangible business value to Cybage’s global customers by offering them lowest per unit cost in a market segment together with an inherent mechanism to mitigate the outsourcing risk. About ExcelShore The ExcelShore model of Operational Excellence is Cybage’s innovative concept in the global software services industry. ExcelShore aims at maximizing the clients’ Return on Investment (ROI) by optimizing at every step across the life cycle of software engagement. The objective is that every dollar that clients invest in Cybage returns to them amplified with a least possible efficiency loss. ExcelShore also empowers objective decision making and project risk mitigation across the life cycle of software engagement through a real-time and sophisticated dashboard featuring the important project Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The way the ExcelShore model works is real time, comprehensive, and integrated. Projects under the relationship are executed leveraging Cybage’s ExcelShore model. As soon as a relationship with a client begins, ExcelShore puts the client’s objectives right on top. The sophisticated algorithmic software-powered system gets into action and lays out various dynamics of project execution for the relationship. Each module within the system is designed to provide key insights into each stage of offshore software engagement, thereby enabling optimization and objective decision making. It provides a comprehensive and sophisticated dashboard that provides project KPIs as data gets generated during project inception (such as team composition, skill sets, and milestones, among others) and project execution (such as project attrition, performance appraisal, scaling up, new recruitment, project profitability, and risk forecasting, among others). Thus, ExcelShore empowers stakeholders across the hierarchy to keep a tab over the projects in their respective roles and responsibilities, leading to every relationship meeting its inherent objectives and thereby growing consistently over a period of time. The Idea Continuous improvement and maximizing client’s ROI through optimization has always been Cybage’s core business philosophy right from its inception 16 years back. As software services business started getting cluttered and increasingly being viewed as commodity business, Cybage strongly believed that its expertise in maximizing ROI through continuous optimization and mitigating clients’ outsourcing risk has an incomparable merit. That was the time in early 2005 when Cybage started crystallizing the tenets for developing an immaculate ExcelShore system that puts its operational excellence at work. The Unique Differentiation Of course there can be similar systems in the market that facilitate business decision making. However, we, at Cybage, believe the ExcelShore system is quite different from them because it imbibes continuous optimization across the project life cycle. This, in turn, directly hits the clients’ business bottom line thereby maximizing ROI. The algorithms, business logic, and the inbuilt artificial intelligence enabling optimization are proprietary to Cybage and have been uniquely mastered in-house. Target Market So far, Cybage’s target market by and large has been the software product companies—Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) as they are popularly known. Having established its leadership in Product Engineering market, Cybage is now expanding its service offerings to diverse industry verticals—the end users of IT systems. Independent of the market segments being targeted, the impact that Cybage makes by maximizing the returns on each dollar spent is quite strong and long lasting. For instance, product companies can reduce their costs dramatically that directly increases their profit margin and again it’s a question of value for money. Business Value Creation ExcelShore directly hits the tangible monetary value and the clients’ business bottom line. While there are scores of software services companies in India that boast of many goodies and make tall claims, Cybage stands distinctly apart from them with optimization being in its blood stream. There is a difference between “low cost” and “optimization”, and we are talking about “value for money” here—what do you get at what price? Future Outlook Cybage has a well-planned road map for further development of the ExcelShore system. The future developments would be aimed at integrating the ExcelShore system with all the business processes and decisions, thereby covering the entire value-chain under an IT services business. Because ExcelShore imbibes operational excellence into the business blood stream, Cybage has ambitious plans to offer end-to-end consulting services to the organizations aiming at operational excellence. The consulting services will leverage implementation of the ExcelShore system and related re-orchestration of business processes marching towards operational excellence.