Best kept secret

ACNHow did it get off the ground? You were a small organisation then?
NMNCR corporate saw that offshoring was growing rapidly. CIOs and CEOs in Europe and US now have objectives to offshore a large percentage of their business. This is a growing trend and it’s moving into the Middle East and Africa (MEA). CEOs and CIOs have to deliver more from static operational budgets.
I was challenged with building an offshoring consultancy and growing it to a 200-strong organisation within two years. It sort of went: “Here’s x million dollars. Spend it wisely. We need every single ETL tool covered as a skills set; we need every business intelligence tool skills set covered; and, by the way, make sure you don’t lose any money in year one”.

ACNHow’s it going? Are you meeting that challenge?
NMWe certainly met it in Year One and we’re beating our plan in Year Two. We’re 150 people at the moment and the only constraint on reaching our 200-man target is our Islamabad facility. We need more office space. But I’m going for it. The business in the sales pipeline demands it.
We are a runaway success. In MEA, the largest telco in Bahrain is a Teradata account; the largest telco in Saudi Arabia is a Teradata account; in Egypt it’s the same; and in Pakistan, four out of seven national telco companies are now Teradata customers.

ACNWhat sort of growth are you talking about and what sort of challenges have you faced in realising it?
NMIf you talk percentages, to grow from 24 to 150 that’s 600% growth in 18 months. To manage an operation growing that quickly and to be able to build the right management team has taken some doing. But getting the right people in the right quantity and quality was never an issue.
The biggest challenge we had was market perception. “Why Pakistan?” We were able to convince all our prospects that Pakistan makes sense. The financial and quality proposition is just too compelling. If a CIO can buy the same commodity skill for a fraction of the cost back home for the same if not improved service level, why wouldn’t he do this especially as the GCC team can assure him of data privacy, data security, competency and has standards such as CMM or ISO. All of these things we have covered. I’m working to be ISO 17799 certified. The GCC is the only offshore services delivery organisation in Pakistan that is CMM level 5.

ACNWhy did you chose to locate GCC in Pakistan rather than India where offshoring and outsourcing are well established and high level skills readily available?
NMWe did this because Pakistan is part of our larger Europe & Middle East Africa operation and, over the past five years, the highest concentration of Teradata footprints in the MEA region have been achieved by the sales team in Pakistan. It’s been driving the growth in Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Cyprus, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and now Kuwait and Qatar.
In Pakistan, we have a very large university-educated base of graduates with the same drive, ambition and ethos to get educated to get into IT. So there was already a huge pool of professionals in the country for us to draw from.
Now what that meant was that we were able to quickly build a very competent delivery team that first proved its mettle in Pakistan before supporting projects in MEA. Our largest data warehouse implementation in Saudi has been completely developed by the Pakistan delivery team.

ACNWhat sort of level of skills are you talking about having on board?
NMIn addition to their computer science qualifications and on-the-job expertise, we have our own education programme. It’s called the Teradata Masters Programme. To be a Master you need to have developed the highest level of Teradata development expertise. These guys don’t fall from trees. Relatively speaking Pakistan – the EMEA GCC – has more Masters than any other Teradata operation. We have more than 34 sitting in Islamabad. This pool of high level skills comes from the fact that these guys are young and hungry. They want to achieve that education and climb up the career ladder.

ACNDo you have the same recruitment and retention issues as India?
NMWe have a very high profile in Pakistan. We are the premier offshoring company. Every IT graduate from the best IT colleges says he wants to work for Teradata. The EMEA GCC is recruiting from the equivalent of good red brick universities in the UK. I’m recruiting the cream from the best colleges of Pakistan – LUMS, IBA, FAST, and NUST. They just prefer to work for us rather than the commercial sector in the country. So recruitment is not a problem.

ACNEven so, Teradata has repeated the Pakistani GCC model in India. Is there much rivalry between the operations?
NMThere is an easy collaborative model of existence between the two. Indeed, we have even worked together on projects. Each GCC has its own geographic focus, where Pakistan supports projects in Europe and the Middle East, India is focused on the Americas. However, both can use any excess capacity to assist in each other’s market.
We were reasonably mature at our launch and so got a head start on some of the initial leads for the outsourcing business in the Americas. Any notion of in-house rivalry is misplaced because both the Indian operation and EMEA GCC are increasingly developing specialisations. This offshore market pie can be sliced in so many technologies and skill sets. There is enough business there. If Gartner reckons business intelligence services is a $28 billion market, we’re just scratching the surface with an organisation of 150 people.

ACNWhat sort of offshoring Teradata services do you provide?
NMIn terms of the pie, 60% of the GCC work is offshore ETL development, which is that techie code development to populate the data warehouse and CRM solutions. About 12% to 15% of my business is outsourcing. This was zero last year. It didn’t exist. As for the rest – analytics – Business Objects, Hyperion, Cognos all of those upper end BI skills sets – are growing to become 15% of our business.
We have access to all the programming skills: C++, .NET, Java. I am the only organisation in EMEA today that is supporting the development of .NET, Java and C++.
In terms of development we provide Teradata SQL development, performance optimisation, Teradata enhancements, data mining, in fact any kind of flavour of Teradata skills sets that exist in the market today.

ACNIt sounds as if the outsourcing side of the business was an opportunistic development. What services are your providing?
NMMy focus is on what we term Production Support services from an outsourcing perspective. This involves the EMEA GCC supporting the Teradata database of the largest US American online retailer. I’m also doing outsourcing for another American online retailer 24×7 from Islamabad and I’m mobilising for customers in Belgium, Germany and Norway to manage various system support levels from Islamabad.
For our customer in Oslo, we’ll be doing all of their CRM application management on Teradata. This includes application user management, tools administration, reporting scheduling, instance management, all overnight batch monitoring jobs, the loading of the data warehouse transformation and all of the DBA tasks – backups recovery, monitoring systems, user profiling disaster recovery everything. It will all be done from our Islamabad facility.
For a customer in Ireland we’re doing applications management as an outsourcing service. It’s growing in such a way that we get a new customer query every day.

ACNYou talk about your Middle East successes in the telco sector. What’s happening on the banking side and how much potential is there in the region?
NMI see huge potential. It’s a ripple effect. It comes in from America to Europe and then to MEA.
What we are seeing in MEA is more and more companies looking to offshore. They’re saying: “OK, well if I can offshore my data base administration, I can evolve my freed DBAs up the food chain. They understand the data warehouse better than anyone. They know my business as well. Let me move the level of their analysis higher so that they can provide more business value to me and basically let these guys in Islamabad do all the commodity tasks”.
Because of NCR’s Financial Solutions (ATM) business, we have very good relationships with banks by default. This is a good platform for future growth, however a typical Teradata sales cycle is not one month. It can take 12 to18 months to sell a project.

ACNWhat’s driving the growth in the region?
NMOn average, we are growing 8% to 12% a year. What we’re finding is that in the UK and Germany, where customers have had Teradata for 10 years, they are well up the usage curve and driving predictive and advanced analytic reporting.
The Middle East is more at the start of the curve – getting to understand the business. Telcos have reached a point where they have a big enough customer base to warrant investing in a data warehouse. Competition is happening, so they need to understand their customers better. That’s what’s driving them. They need a data warehouse and a CRM solution.

ACNApart from you skills sets and market need, to what do you attribute GCC’s success to date?
NMEvery consultancy worth its salt has a methodology. First of all we are the only CRM data warehousing organisation in Pakistan at CMM Level 5 which adds a huge amount of respect to our ability to control quality issues, to manage projects in a structured format. One of the things that helped us achieve a CMM Level 5 rating was that we consciously developed from scratch the methodologies to support offshoring. So, when we had an independent assessment of our organisation these were the things that helped us get CMM5.

ACNSo, what are your plans for the GCC in the coming years? Does marketing feature in this at all?
NMI want to grow the EMEA GCC operation to become a 300-consultant organisation next year and launch a comprehensive data warehousing offshore testing and solution Integration service for Teradata customers. I’m also planning an aggressive production support services programme for both Applications and Database support and optimisation.
And yes, I’ll be launching strong marketing campaigns to raise an awareness of the EMEA GCC.
||**||