Author: Phaneesh

Context

BankCo, a leading European Bank, with excess of $2 Bn in technology spend, was using a considerable portion of that budget to build as well as buy technology services for the organization. Taking cognizance of the change in the banking environment as well as the evolving technology landscape, BankCo approached Primentor to ensure that their technology needs remained current and were efficient from an investment productivity standpoint.

Approach

Over a 1.5 year engagement, Primentor benchmarked BankCo’s technology spend against similar sized players from the banking industry, identified key transformational initiatives to substantially optimize the quantum of spend and improve the overall quality of service and institutionalized a dedicated program office to ensure the seamless execution of the various cross-functional transformation initiatives.

The key transformations undertaken over the course of this exercise were as follows:

1. Optimal resource mix – Analyzed BankCo’s CIO and Sourcing function around aspects such as structure, underlying roles and responsibilities and executed a transformation towards a more efficient internal design, built around right-size, right-skill and right-profile across levels
2. Contract / Performance analysis – Benchmarked the major technology services outsourcing contracts at BankCo on parameters, such as pricing model, investments, delivery model, SLAs etc. and evaluated the vendor performance on those contracts
3. Business-aligned technology footprint – Assessed the existing technology landscape / emerging needs at BankCo to refine the overall budget and implement a roadmap towards a more efficient technology footprint at the bank
4. Restructuring / re-bidding outsourced spend – Managed fresh empanelment of outsourcing vendors based on BankCo’s emerging requirements and drove award of restructured work-packages through a transparent RFP framework

Outcomes

As a result of this structured intervention, Primentor managed to support BankCo in achieving the following:

• ~25% savings in BankCo’s internal CIO and Sourcing budgets – owing to ~15% reduction in headcount and an additional replacement of high cost resource pool
• Repackaged and contracted approx. 60% of the technology services outsourcing spend – resulting in 30% savings and productivity improvement commitments of 5%-8% on an annualized basis

Context

During the early 1990s, A Large-IT-Co was one of the pioneers in the newly-emerging technology services outsourcing industry. Despite a head start, the organization had seen only marginal growth since inception and remained quite small – $2 Mn. topline by the 10^th year of existence. It’s against this backdrop, that the founders approached Phaneesh in order to accelerate the organization’s growth.

Approach

Phaneesh joined the Large-IT-Co in their Sales & Marketing function and was instrumental in transforming the go-to-market of the Large-IT-Co along the following areas:

• Identified trends in the market and defined core sales themes / campaigns on an ongoing basis to drive the top-line growth for the Large-IT-Co
• Pioneered the disruptive Global Delivery Model (GDM) and institutionalized it across all service offerings of the company
• Completely overhauled the sales process by introducing a Consultative and Relationship-based Selling Approach at the Large-IT-Co – a paradigm, which was later adopted by the industry at large
• Oversaw the expansion of the Large-IT-Co sales across various geographies and helped build the Large-IT-Co’s brand as an industry bell-weather

Outcomes

Over the course of his tenure at the Large-IT-Co, Phaneesh was elevated to the Board and became the Worldwide Head of Sales & Marketing, Communication and Product Solutions Group. During this ~10-year stint:

• The Large-IT-Co’s revenues jumped 300-fold to $750 Mn
• Competitive pricing and GDM-led efficiencies helped the Large-IT-Co realize industry-leading operating margins of 35%
• The Large-IT-Co’s enterprise value jumped almost 2000 times to $13.5 Bn

Context

In early 2000s, despite reasonable scale and operations, A Mid-IT-Co was a distressed technology staffing organization, with a negligible project portfolio and (-) 20% operating margins. Given the stressed financials and in light of accelerating commoditization of the GDM model, the Mid-IT-Co founding team requested Phaneesh to lead the turnaround of the business.

Approach

Phaneesh took over as the CEO of the Mid-IT-Co and undertook the following transformations:

• Changed the business portfolio of the Mid-IT-Co by systematically cannibalizing staffing / sub-contracting portion of the business with project-based work, which was in turn delivered using the global delivery model at higher margins
• Rebranded and repositioned the Mid-IT-Co in the industry, defined a new portfolio of go-to-market offerings and completely re-structured the organization by bringing all the key markets & offerings under the Mid-IT-Co global brand
• Anticipated the commoditization of technology services and created a strong differentiation for the Mid-IT-Co as well as disruption in the industry by introducing ‘Delivery of converged technology and operations using business outcomes’

Outcomes

Over 11-years, Phaneesh transformed the Mid-IT-Co from a virtually unknown entity to one of the top 10 Indian IT players and one of the most valued enterprises in the global technology services industry:

• Delivered exponential growth in top-line, to clock revenues in excess of $1.2 Bn
• Turned around operating margins to a healthy +25%
• Realized a 70x increase in enterprise value to $4.8 Bn