November 2008 Silicon India

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BUSINESS & TECHNOLOGY IN THE U.S. & INDIA NOVEMBER - 2008 SILICONINDIA.COM

PUBLISHED SINCE 1997

sil iconindia

si100 SPOTLIGHT: StrataLight Communications KESDEE

Hiten Patel

Chairman & CEO

Mohan Sekhar

President & COO



“There is no doubt that organizations are collabo-

rating more and more. I see collaboration as an

engine that can drive rapid growth, and if nec-

essary radical innovation as well,” says the author Ralph

B. Welborn in his widely popular book Jericho Principle.

Collabera is one among such few companies that believe

in bringing value for customers by adopting collaborative

models, especially in this fast changing technology space,where many IT vendors are struggling to keep their cus-

tomers remain engaged with them. This Morristown, New

Jersey based IT consulting services and solutions firm be-

lieves that engaging with the customer in a ‘collaborative’

manner, by being consultative, by offering domain specific

solutions, and embracing Enterprise 2.0 principles in their

delivery models, could be a game changer.

In the world of the so-called commoditized IT services

arena where a lot of biggies like Accenture, IBM, Wipro,

Infosys, and many others play around, Collabera needed a

Collabera

si l icon i n d i a | 10|N o v e m b e r 2 0 0 8

A ccelerated V alue

Bridging the Gap

The mission of Collabera’s consulting organization is to help

clients accelerate the value of IT to their business by helping IT

become agile, and by helping IT bridge the strategy-execution gap

through hands-on, cost effective, highly mature, industry

specific consulting solutions

By Jayakishore Bayadi

Founded: January, 1991

Chairman & CEO: Hiten Patel

President & COO: Mohan Sekhar

Headcount: 4000

No. Of Offices: 19

Global Delivery Centers: 3

Global Headquarters: Morristown, NJ, U.S.A.

Vertical Focus: Financial Services, Communications, Media,

Manufacturing, and Retail.

Collabera Quick Facts

Cover Story



strong differentiator to stand out in the crowd. They decided

on being a strong consultative partner to clients in chosen

domains by offering IP driven business solutions. “Our

client engagement model has changed to being more of an

advisory partner and our services are more prescriptive.This required the entire organization’s DNA to be trans-

formed towards a consultative mindset,” states Mohan

Sekhar, President and COO, Collabera.

No doubt, there is a strong reason for Collabera to feel

good, because their forward-looking approach gives them an

edge over the market scenario as well as their competition.

The company’s go-to-market positioning is about bridging

the execution gap and helping customers adapt to shifting

market needs. Collabera’s proprietary Momentum consulting

framework delivers asset based domain solutions and serv-

ices to clients with greater success and predictability. Informs

Hiten Patel, Chairman and CEO, Collabera, “With our pro-

prietary methodologies such as Momentum, Asset Based

Services (ABS), and collaborative engagement models, we

help our customers experience accelerated value by bridging

the critical gaps between business and IT.”

Today, with revenues of

$300 million, the company

employs over 4,000 highly

skilled professionals at 19

offices and three world-class delivery centers in the

U.S., Europe, and India.

This global delivery model

leverages a best-in-class

quality system, which in-

cludes SEI CMM I Level 5

and ISO 27001 security cer-

tifications to deliver a full

portfolio of services to the

global 2000 companies in

the areas of Consulting, Ap-

plication Development and

Management, Enterprise

Software Solutions, Inde-

pendent Testing, Data

Warehousing and Business Intelligence.

Bridging the Gap: An Innovative ApproachA leading publisher in UK whose flagship paper boasts a

circulation of nearly 1 million prints was facing challenges

in synchronizing their two channels of publishing — print

and online. Existing applications were non-cohesive and

non-communicating.

Collabera approached this not just as an IT opportu-

nity, and instead took a holistic approach to address the

business need. Collabera analyzed the existing opera-

tions, technology, and systems environment through its

4 week consulting workshop and came up with a strategy

to streamline the processes, improve agility, and control

the cost of operations. Collabera also automated the ag-

gregation and presentation process, thus ensuring the

client to gain operational efficiency and reduce the cost

of maintaining multiple applications.

So, what makes Collabera different is the way in which

it perceives customer’s needs and how they create the glue

between concept to strategy to realization. The key layers

of any organization would be its strategy, business process,

application, and infrastructure layers. Most enterprises face

challenges due to the gaps that exist between these four lay-

ers, which prevent them from meeting their strategic ob-

jectives as most of the solutions available in the market

typically address only one of the four layers. “The reasons

for this could be several. The key ones would be loss of in-

formation, lack of streamlined effort, semantic disconnect,

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Adopting such collaboration

methodologies Collabera

brings in transparency and

increased participation

from multiple stakeholders,which ultimately results in

consensus driven output Hiten Patel



capacity mismatches like in the areas of infrastructure,

budgets, skill sets, and lack of adoptability or flexibility,”

says Jayanth Selvappullai, Global Marketing Head.

Added to this, the ever increasing and always shifting

market demands keep continuously raising the bar.Collabera looks at the client’s needs holistically, cut-

ting across the internal silos. This is where their consul-

tative mindset, asset based solutions, collaboration, and

innovation aspects play a role and make the difference.

Consulting Led Services PhilosophyThe ability of an organization to sense and respond to ex-

ternal market changes and internal business needs is crit-

ical for it to survive and thrive in any economic condition.

Collabera believes that there are four key characteristics

that must be present in an organization to exhibit this

agility; namely ‘flexibility’ the ability to react to, and in

some instances predict, change; ‘adaptability’ the ability

to react to unpredictable changes; ‘awareness’ the ability

to be aware of and utilize the right information and activi-

ties that drive its agility; and ‘productivity’ the effective-

ness and efficiency of processes and operations.

How organizations leverage their IT capabilities could

be a key enabler or be a major obstacle in their quest to be

agile. “Collabera’s consulting organization ensures that IT

organizations can ‘accelerate’ their ‘value recognition’ and

deliver to their business by helping them prepare to meet

the challenges of unexpected business changes, better pre-

dict what business and related IT changes should be ex-

pected, provide their business the ability to use the right

information at the right time, and finally be efficient and

effective in the delivery of their services,” explains Shafqat

Azim, Head of Consulting and Advisory Services who re-

cently has come on board from Gartner Consulting. Con-

sulting services are focused in four areas; IT Strategy,

Architecture and Technology, Sourcing, and Program Man-

agement. It provides substantial depth of coverage and

hands-on experience in each of the

practices, which enable the clients

transform their IT organizations.

Collabera uses its Momentum

consulting framework to keep

everyone focused on the outcome

and impact on the organization at

every step towards realizing it.

“There are three primary phases of

Momentum, firstly, Problem Defi-

nition, secondly Prioritization, and

thirdly the ROI roadmap,” expli-

cates Eric Carlson, SVP Consulting. Collabera designed

this consulting framework to provide high-quality results

within a reduced time frame. “We analyze the business is-

sues, identify the end goal, and then guide the client

through prioritizing the recommended actions to ensure our

efforts are focused on the specific actions that will deliver

the greatest benefits to the client,” says Carlson.“Momentum methodology quickly creates a consensus

on project scope and priorities across business and IT,” says

a Senior Director at a major U.S. Insurance Company, a key

client of Collabera.

Asset Based Domain SolutionsWell, Momentum is not just a methodology; it is also based

on the assets behind it. For each selected vertical the com-


Collabera’s consulting

organization ensures that IT

organizations can

“accelerate” their “value

recognition” and deliver to

their business by helpingthem prepare to meet the

business challenges

Shafqat Azim

Cover Story




pany has a library of reference architectures, business

processes, and business models pre-built ahead of time with

it, and calls them ‘assets’.

Broadly, Asset Based Services (ABS) is Collabera’s

next generation execution framework that is built on theconcept of repeatable service delivered through a combi-

nation of IPs, frameworks, best practices, and skills that en-

sure higher level of productivity and quality for customers.

Building several reusable assets through innovation trig-

gered by client’s needs forms the heart of ABS.

Collabera has chosen Banking, Communications,

Media, Retail, and Manufacturing as the key domains to

offer their solutions to. “These are the areas where we will

continue to invest in building assets and accelerators which

will help solve client’s business problems in the shortest

time possible,” informs Sekhar.

For instance, instead of taking standard application de-

velopment services, Collabera has developed the Digital

Transformation solution for the publishing media, which

directly aligns to the current challenges the publishing

media is facing and the hurdles it encounters in leveraging

the online channel.

“For the telecom clients, we have developed the Rev-

enue Assurance solution, which is a significant pain area

for the service providers, and no single product available

in the market can solve the revenue leakage issues fully,”

says Krishnamurthy Ramamurthy, Global Delivery Head.

Another area is enterprise mobility. “We are expanding the

capability significantly here by developing an enterprise

mobility offering that covers strategy to implementation

and building an application framework to accelerate the

process of extending enterprise applications to the mobile

community,” clarifies Krishnamurthy.

Collaborative Engagement ModelsCollabera’s unique collaborative engagement models are

specially conceived for delivering services with greater suc-

cess and predictability. As we all know, over the past few

years, the IT Industry has seen tremendous growth, espe-

cially in countries like India. The trigger for offshoring was

primarily led by the need for cost-effective delivery to

clients, and India became home of the global delivery

model with most of the companies operating in an onshore-

offshore model.

But a majority of the Indian IT players focused their ef-

forts on increasing the offshore effort to protect their mar-

gins. This model of operating with a thin client-site

presence was not so successful with many of the Fortune

1000 companies that have been facing operational chal-

lenges. This has led to evolution of their Collaborative En-

gagement Models based on a customer-centric execution

philosophy, which leverages offshore advantages. “Inter-

estingly, our model evaluates the clients’ projects in six di-

mensions: time to market, criticality, technology, domain,

process maturity, and risks. And depending on the outcome

we recommend to the client an execution framework which

could be a stand alone or combination of client site, offsite,

and offshore delivery models,” explains Ashwin Rao,

Global Sales Head. Today, Collabera sees that this model

is indeed a clear differentiator and is leading to increasing

client satisfaction.

InnovationLeading through innovation is a critical part of Collabera’s

asset based service delivery model. A significant investment

has been made in instilling the culture of innovation and

technology thought leadership through Collabera Labs. The

group’s charter includes creation of IP assets, newer tech-

nology adoption, and research. “The lab is also responsible

for solution ideation, tech consulting and building technol-

ogy toolsets that make our software developers more pro-

ductive,” explains Bala Variyam, head of Technology.

1. Consulting Services

2. Application Development & Maintenance Services

3. Independent Testing Services

4. Enterprise Software Solutions

5. Outsourced Product Development

6. Business Intelligence & Data Warehousing

7. Professional Services

SERVICE OFFERINGS




Cover Story

Currently, Collabera Labs is working on initiatives such

as Mobility, Enterprise 2.0, and Software Engineering

(Requirement Management) amongst others. The team

has also instilled a formal feedback mechanism to solicit

vital inputs from the client site that contribute to the

process of building IP assets.

Ideas and PrinciplesIn this era of globalization, more and more organizations

have started seeing collaboration as a critical require-

ment for their success. In fact the name of the company,

‘Collabera’, is derived from the word ‘collaboration’,

which is precisely the way in which the company works.

“It is a reflection of where the company is headed to-

wards and it also reflects partnership and teamwork,”

says Sekhar.

Interestingly, many of the Enterprise 2.0 companies

also reflect the same principles. Enterprise 2.0 tools like

Blogs and Wikis and many others are essentially collab-

oration tools, which are useful for sharing unstructured

information associated with ad hoc or ongoing projects

and processes.

“We believe that by adopting such collaboration

methodologies we can bring in transparency and increase

participation from multiple stakeholders, which ulti-

mately results in consensus driven output,” says Patel.

The Road AheadA forward looking company that has

seen key leadership additions in recent

times, Collabera aspires to script a new

history in the IT consulting and services

arena. Sekhar, who has had consider-

able success in driving growth and

transformation at Infosys and iGATE,

joined Collabera in May 2008. He is re-

sponsible for building and transforming

global IT services business of the company and making Col-

labera a premier brand for customers and employees. “With

our innovative collaborative approach and the experienced

team, we’ll achieve success in the next few years,” affirms a

confident Sekhar. “Collabera is now well positioned and has

the fundamental building blocks (consulting, alliances, assets

and global delivery) with multiple growth engines. We are con-

fident of Collabera’s success with world class delivery and cus-

tomer engagement team,” adds Patel.

In terms of market, Collabera is currently targeting the U.S.

and U.K. It plans to spread out its reach to most parts of Europe

soon. With well-defined strategies and roadmaps, certainly

there is a bright prospect for Collabera to fulfill its aim to touch

the sky of unlimited opportunities. “Collaboration is going to be

the way going forward”, and Collabera strongly believes in

this principle. si

Mohan Sekhar

Documents

November 2008 Silicon India