This continues a series of guest columns from practitioners
and bloggers I respect. The category - The Real Deal describes them well.
Last week I had a post on why we do not see "supplier" tiering in the
outsourcing world while it is so common in most manufacturing markets. The post
was triggered by an article in BusinessWeek on a firm called
Anantara, which is attempting a tiered delivery model - and on a globally
distributed basis.
G.B. Prabhat, founder of this firm, read it and started a dialog. I invited him to present his POV below. He was Director, Consulting and Enterprise Solutions, Satyam Computer Services Limited before this start up. And in 1995 had launched Satyam Renaissance - so has seen many aspects of the outsourcing business. He is also a prolific writer - including a couple of fiction novels.
Marker 1 – Business
Solutions
Technology solutions will have to be embedded in vastly more
complex Business Solutions of which they will be but a part. A Business
Solution is different from a technology solution in that it improves the
business performance of the client in measurable, tangible terms such as profitability,
market share, and return on capital employed.
Marker 2 – Business
Partner-enabled delivery
Anantara trusts the production of many components of it
solutions to its Business Partners in its global supplier network called the
Anantara Ecosystem. The Business Partner-enabled delivery model frees Anantara
to focus on the client, integration, program management and business value
delivery. SGO will help embed, in a democratic and secular fashion, the world’s
best efficiencies in various components by a global sourcing model rather than
assume large companies with offshoring in
Other markers include risk-reward or equity based pricing against the now dominant time- and-materials and fixed pricing.
In the short period of our existence since January 2007,
evidence of the effectiveness of SGO is steadily gathering. We are now
servicing customers in 8 countries using the SGO model with suppliers in 4
countries:
Amidst many challenges, customers’ receptivity to SGO is gratifying. Working on the challenges of installing SGO will constitute our near-term business endeavor. “
Prabhat can be emailed at gbprabhat@gmail.com