What is your aspiration over the next 10 years?
My goal, over the next 10 years, is to have iGATE recognized as the company that changed the whole industry business model.
One of the advantages that the Indian offshore industry had in the early 1990s was we killed the CIO 10-year outsourcing contract.
As an offshore industry, we used to ask them to do two projects with us, and then if that works well, four projects and then if that works well, a contract for three years with no committed revenues and to keep earning our revenues.
From a CIO perspective, it was great to have the vendor re-earning his revenues every year. Today, hardly do you find a 10-year contract.
The entire industry has been quoting at dollars per hour. It is a crazy metric for it creates for vendors a premium for being inefficient and intellectually lazy, because if you are, you will take more hours to do work and you will get more revenues as a result. It is not a good partnership model.
My goal is to move the industry to this (iTOPS) model of integrating technology and process and charging on an outcome or results based approach, by 2015. By this time, I want all the CIOs, CFOs to be saying, ‘Why did we ever pay these companies for effort? We should have always been paying them for output.’
What has been the response to the iTOPS model?
The customers have started to react very well and that has been the part of the growth story for iGATE. It will force the other companies to start doing it over the next 2-3 years.
Slowly, if they follow suit on a game where I have designed the rules, hopefully we will come out as a strong player and one of the leaders in this industry.
How worried are you on the global economic situation?
From a short-term perspective, there are concerns. However, from a long-term perspective, I don’t think we should be worried.
In 1991-92, I used to talk about the addressable market for Indian services as being about $25 billion. Today, the entire industry is $55 billion and I consider the addressable market as $1.5 trillion.
Image: This is Yellow Stone, where iGate's IT delivery teams sit. | Photograph, courtesy: iGate
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