Outsourcing: Sanjay Dhawan, CEO of Symphony Services (Part 7)

Sraman Mitra: The point I’m trying to make is that there is a filter, and you’re making these bets with a lens in mind. Your end goal is to use these companies to get into larger companies that will acquire them. What I’m talking about is a scale of one million entrepreneurs reaching $1 million in revenues. Many of these companies will never get acquired. These are going to be cash businesses. These are little businesses that will be maybe $2 million, $5 million businesses and they will remain that. Nobody will ever acquire them. >>>

Outsourcing: Sanjay Dhawan, CEO of Symphony Services (Part 6)

SM: That’s exactly my point. You can, if you go into a niche that is an up and coming niche that is potentially underserved and you develop core competency – the real operating words are core competency.

SD: Yes. Their story, their focus was very UI and design focused. Immediately before this, like I said, I ran Aricent as its president. We had a similar model in previous company. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of a company called Frog Design, which is one of the largest design companies in the world. They helped Steve Jobs design his first Mac. The original Mac design was done by Frog Design, and they were owned by my previous company. So, I have followed that whole life cycle of combining design with development. I think that was a niche that Globant started. Once you get your foot strongly placed, then you start achieving scale. >>>

Outsourcing: Sanjay Dhawan, CEO of Symphony Services (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You can set up a 1,000-person operation in a certain region, especially if you run your own university. I don’t think that should be a problem.

San Dhawan: Right.

SM: There are two other topics I want to explore. One is, how do you go from a $200 million to a $1 billion company, assuming that’s your objective? >>>

Outsourcing: Sanjay Dhawan, CEO of Symphony Services (Part 4)

SM: You’re located in Bangalore?

SD: The main sites are Bangalore and Pune, but we do have satellite offices in Mumbai and Delhi, Gurgaon.

SM: Is there any thought in the company to look at other cities, more heartland cities, lower cost destinations?

SD: Within India, do you mean? >>>

Outsourcing: Sanjay Dhawan, CEO of Symphony Services (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Do you sometimes do product development work for smaller companies for equity?

Sanjay Dhawan: We did … not for equity per se, but it would be more from a risk and reward standpoint. We structure the engagement model where a portion of the payments are tied to either achieving certain outcomes or a portion of the payment is revenue share, that type of stuff.

SM: Switching to your 4,000-people operation, is that all in India? Is the development team largely or entirely in India? >>>

Outsourcing: Sanjay Dhawan, CEO of Symphony Services (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let me ask my question again now that you’ve provided context that would be helpful for our readers about what you do. Let’s say Salesforce.com or IBM or a company like that is trying to make a decision about what are they going to build in-house and what are they going to outsource to an OPD (outsourced product development) player. How do they make that assessment, and what have you learned in your business with them? >>>

Outsourcing: Sanjay Dhawan, CEO of Symphony Services (Part 1)

In the early days of software, using it was as simple as buying a licensing agreement, and then uploading the software to each employee’s desktop. The evolution of computers is moving at such a rapid pace that in order to keep up, companies have to refurbish existing software to accommodate employees who are no longer chained to their desks from nine to five. Instead, telecommuting or making the most of long commutes on public transportation by using their laptops or smart phones to get their work done. That’s where companies like Palo Alto, California-based Symphony Services come in. Symphony has a presence throughout the United States and India and in Surrey, United Kingdom, and has a client list with names like Oracle, Yahoo, Motorola, Google, and Hitachi. >>>

Outsourcing: Arul Murugan, Founder and CEO of Enrich IT (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You said that it’s not easy to do IT services. That’s not entirely true, you know. I think what you are going to see — and you have not seen this yet — but in a way, what you are doing right now with the services business is almost, as you said, very specialized, and it’s almost productized services.

Arul Murugan: What I meant was if  I am a doing pure services, like consulting services, it’s hard to scale up a consulting services business. It’s easy to scale up a cloud computing business, because cloud computing is more productized. For example, what I am doing on the supply chain as a private cloud model, it is easy to scale up. For example, if I want to grow to $100 million in the next few years, I cannot just grow that in my consulting services. It’s plenty of hard work for me to do that, but on the private cloud model, it’s easy for me to grow. >>>