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si100 SPOTLIGHT: StrataLight Communications KESDEE

PUBLISHED SINCE 1997

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

si100

Mohan Sekhar
President & COO

Hiten Patel
Chairman & CEO
 Cover Story

Collabera
Bridging the Gap

Accelerated Value
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

“T
here is no doubt that organizations are collabo-
Collabera Quick Facts
rating more and more. I see collaboration as an
engine that can drive rapid growth, and if nec- Founded: January, 1991
essary radical innovation as well,” says the author Ralph Chairman & CEO: Hiten Patel
B. Welborn in his widely popular book Jericho Principle. President & COO: Mohan Sekhar
Collabera is one among such few companies that believe Headcount: 4000
in bringing value for customers by adopting collaborative No. Of Offices: 19
models, especially in this fast changing technology space, Global Deliver y Centers: 3
where many IT vendors are struggling to keep their cus- Global Headquarters: Morristown, NJ, U.S.A.
tomers remain engaged with them. This Morristown, New Vertical Focus: Financial Services, Communications, Media,
Jersey based IT consulting services and solutions firm be- Manufacturing, and Retail.
lieves that engaging with the customer in a ‘collaborative’
manner, by being consultative, by offering domain specific In the world of the so-called commoditized IT services
solutions, and embracing Enterprise 2.0 principles in their arena where a lot of biggies like Accenture, IBM, Wipro,
delivery models, could be a game changer. Infosys, and many others play around, Collabera needed a

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|10| November 2008
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.
Adopting such collaboration
methodologies Collabera
brings in transparency and
increased participation
from multiple stakeholders,
which ultimately results in
consensus driven output
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- Hiten Patel
pendent Testing, Data
Warehousing and Business Intelligence.
Bridging the Gap: An Innovative Approach
A 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,
siliconindia
|11|November 2008
 Cover Story

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 Philosophy

The 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- Collabera’s consulting
organization ensures that IT
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
organizations can ‘accelerate’ their ‘value recognition’ and “accelerate” their “value
recognition” and deliver to
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 their business by helping
information at the right time, and finally be efficient and them prepare to meet the
business challenges
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, cates Eric Carlson, SVP Consulting. Collabera designed
Architecture and Technology, Sourcing, and Program Man- this consulting framework to provide high-quality results
agement. It provides substantial depth of coverage and within a reduced time frame. “We analyze the business is-
hands-on experience in each of the sues, identify the end goal, and then guide the client
practices, which enable the clients through prioritizing the recommended actions to ensure our
transform their IT organizations. efforts are focused on the specific actions that will deliver
Collabera uses its Momentum the greatest benefits to the client,” says Carlson.
consulting framework to keep “Momentum methodology quickly creates a consensus
everyone focused on the outcome on project scope and priorities across business and IT,” says
and impact on the organization at a Senior Director at a major U.S. Insurance Company, a key
every step towards realizing it. client of Collabera.
“There are three primary phases of
Momentum, firstly, Problem Defi- Asset Based Domain Solutions
nition, secondly Prioritization, and Well, Momentum is not just a methodology; it is also based
thirdly the ROI roadmap,” expli- on the assets behind it. For each selected vertical the com-
Shafqat Azim

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|12| November 2008
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 the
concept 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 Models
Collabera’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
SERVICE OFFERINGS
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
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.
Innovation
Leading 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.
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|13| November 2008
 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 Principles
In 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.
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|14| November 2008
The Road Ahead
A 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- Mohan Sekhar
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