Hexaware: Shrink IT. Grow Digital - R Srikrishna

Hexaware moves at the speed of change, poised to accommodate the needs of clients today and anticipate tomorrow's needs. Company CEO R Srikrishna asks if your IT provider does the same.

We live in a world where technological innovations are disrupting the way we live, work and interact with each other. The new age of human experience - artificial intelligence, robotics, driverless cars, drones, wearables, 3D printing and so on - has already begun. These technologies are narrowing the gap between the physical, digital and biological worlds. They are also becoming game-changers in every industry as value chains are being disrupted, more efficiency is brought in and customer centricity is becoming a way of life.

Businesses need to be proactive as customers expect their experience to be flawless and superior. To make this happen, organisations need to change existing systems, processes and technologies. Enterprise data needs to be accessible across the organisation, at the right time to make better-informed decisions. Also, time to market needs to be much faster than ever before to stay ahead of the competition. This change is not going to happen overnight and will also come at a significant cost. It is time for all IT service providers to help their customers shrink their IT expenditure and help in their digital transformation journey.

Shrink IT expenditure

Shrink IT is based on Hexaware's belief that most customers spend 30-40% more than they should on commodity IT such as application support and maintenance (ASM), testing, infrastructure management services (IMS) and business process outsourcing services. As per industry predictions, commodity IT will shrink by 30% in the next decade. Hexaware's proposition is very simple - to help customers shrink commodity IT.

How does Hexaware shrink IT? If the total price a customer pays is unit price (P) times the quantity used (Q), the focus is the reduction/elimination of Q. There are some very specific levers for eliminating and reducing Q. Proactive problem management is an important one from the traditional set of levers.

However, Hexaware believes that to shrink IT significantly, customers would need to embrace a new set of service-line specific levers that have come into play using automation. Hexaware has built a platform, 'Raise IT', with pre-built automation components for IMS and ASM encompassing discovering, monitoring, analysing and self-healing, in addition to predictive analytics for proactive problem management

In BPO services, its robotic process automation (RPA) solution uses the best available platforms in the market and automates the presentation layer to work in an efficient way, eliminating more than 30% of the labour required.

The second set of levers for Q reduction in ASM is application modernisation and rationalisation. In IMS, it is changing the underlying infrastructure components using hyperconverged technology and Hexaware is well positioned to be the world's foremost expert on it. In BPO, it is fully digitised, platform-based services that will deliver highly digitised and optimised processing for domain specific services.

So why is Hexaware the best company to shrink IT? While the outcome of shrinking IT is catastrophic for larger outsourcing providers, it means growth for Hexaware and it is willing to risk cannibalising its own revenues for mutual success.

The 'Grow Digital' aspect

Digital is probably the most overused word these days for obvious reasons. As the competition is getting stiffer by the day, businesses and brands are striving hard to differentiate themselves from the competition. Digitalisation has made it easy and possible for businesses to innovate and create a lasting impression in customers' minds.

So when businesses start thinking about their digital strategy, they need to look at it in totality. A good front end alone is not sufficient to become a digital company.

At Hexaware, the goal is to help its clients change the way they interact with their end customers, employees and supply chain. This is achieved in four ways; the first two are:

• Harnessing the power of data to derive insights on a real-time basis: one reason why digital is capable of bringing a world of possibilities is data. While doing this, one needs to harmonise all types of data including structured, unstructured and sensor data to take real-time decisions. Hexaware has partnered with a platform company to create a solution for ingesting very large amounts of data and creating real-time statistical models for decision-making and operational efficiencies.
• Modernising application and infrastructure landscape through the creation of a composable enterprise: it is not possible to create a digital ecosystem without having the systems and applications that are compatible with newer technologies. Businesses need to change and modernise their application and infrastructure landscape to support digital initiatives.

As an example, Hexaware took a project for an insurance client that faced challenges in dealing with a spike in transactions at their year-end when their customers made changes to their insurance plans or when new customers were added. To deal with this spike, they on-boarded temporary employees. The on-boarding process took an inordinately long time due their complex human resources (HR) application landscape, which was not justified since the employees were required only during the spike. Hexaware transformed their underlying application infrastructure to a cloud-based model using a composable enterprise model where rather than modernising a big, monolithic legacy application with another big application, it broke it up into components based on functionality and used either software as a service (SaaS) products or existing applications to address them. In this case, Hexaware not only managed to shrink IT but also changed the client's experience in engaging with its employees. The other two methods are:

• Driving process harmonisation and re-engineering: process harmonisation is a must for an enterprise to improve and standardise processes across its global and regional business units.
• Using systems of differentiation to engage better with customers, employees and suppliers: systems of engagement need to be built rapidly on top of the systems of records. Since the systems of engagement will often come from SaaS providers, Hexaware is partnering extensively with innovation communities and start-ups.

Another insurance customer had a complex online quote process with high portal drop rates. Hexaware transformed their core processes by building systems of engagement to consume data from the systems of records through an application programming interface (API) layer and integration layer. As a result, their quote creation became five times faster and the drops reduced by 80%.

Hexaware moves at the speed of change, poised to accommodate the needs of clients today and anticipate tomorrow's needs. The question is, does your IT provider?