For the two decades in this period, the software sector largely comprised of firms looking to provide software services to global clients. The first wave of the global Internet and dot-com era created intercontinental Internet infrastructure. Indian companies were able to leverage this infrastructure to deliver software development-related services to global enterprises remotely. Realizing the potential and the availability of talent, some multinational corporations established their own offshore development centers in India. Global multinational companies also realized India’s potential in software services and started increasing their direct presence in India by setting up IT, business process management (BPM), and R&D centers.
Today, several centers have matured to deliver end-to-end products from India. Uber set up an engineering center in 2017, and OVHa unicorn from France, which provides cloud services, set up an R&D center in the country last year. The combination of available talent, lower rates of brain drain to the U.S., large technology companies’ R&D centers, and global venture capitalists has helped accelerate the growth of the start-up ecosystem. In the last few years, 18 start-ups touched USD 1 billion in market capitalization. Walmart bought India’s largest e-commerce company, Flipkart, which is only about 11 years old, at a valuation of USD 21 billion.
In an exclusive email interaction with Ashish Proothi, Head – APAC, Xebia, International Business Magazine learnt about the impact of some of the major disruptors like AI, Cloud Data, IoT, and even the Covid-19 pandemic on the IT consultancy market. Excerpts –
Give us a brief description of the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the data center market, DevOps market, and others, in the year 2022.
The pandemic has changed the entire world pushing it to go digital. There has been a sea change in the functioning of all enterprises, companies and organizations. Digitization, automation, AI, VR are the buzzwords now. Due to the pandemic, organizations have started to learn the real impact of DevOps. It is now proven that Automation is the key to CI/CD enablement for any new application to be developed & pushed to release.
What are the strategies adopted at Xebia Technologies to keep it unique, relevant and profitable?
Xebia has a comprehensive portfolio of digital consultancy services and provides quality services to cover all aspects of digital transformation which includes Data & AI, cloud, Business Agility, Security, Training & Learning, Software Development, Product Management & Quality Improvement. In 2021, Xebia acquired Oblivion to expand their capabilities around Amazon Web Services (AWS). It will help the company to handle cloud projects successfully for their clients in the Benelux and beyond that as well. And again in 2021, the company acquired Appcino to enhance the digital transformation with low-code competencies.
Give us a few highlights of your career – from Oracle to Xebia. What were the challenges you faced? Most memorable projects and some of the important learnings from these organizations.
I have been part of the IT sector for a long time now. We have seen a lot of trends picking up in the last few years in the technology space as customers nowadays are looking for new methodologies and technologies for the future to be adopted. Gone are the days when customers used to rely on on-premises and think about the current fiscal.
With the growing competition, a vision to lead the industry from an evangelist approach bundled with automation is the key to success for every customer and that’s where we at Xebia have been enabling various customers to come up with modern practices by looking at the practices being adopted within the competition & the industry.
The business elements that need to be kept in mind by the newly mushrooming software solution startups in Asia and across the globe.
Xebia has been a Pioneer in enabling new Digital Banks to set up the ecosystem, right from the scratch, by setting up the Cloud environment, Omni-channel solutioning & building up the Super-App while integrating with various channels. The new institutions need to think from the perspective of end customer and do a deep dive analysis of the problem statement to understand what are the pain areas that the customer wants to solve. These Analytical problems once thought thru will enable new institutions to come up with a seamless solution for future customers. Our products and solutions are subject to intense competition and rapid change in almost every market we operate. To maintain the accelerated speed of innovation, large companies are building alliances and partnerships with the start-ups and are actively looking at acquisitions, both for talent and intellectual property.
Share your observation with regards to the latest AI, Cloud Data, IoT and other such technologies in the global scheme of things.
We have the concept of CoEs which are the backbone of Application Development for any organization to connect the dots for full stack Engineering.
A full stack AI strategy is the way forward coupled with Cloud hosting. This is being adopted by various organizations with their eyes on the future. Organizations have currently implemented the full stack approach within their business process developed at a faster pace to beat the competition. Xebia has observed most of the customers moving to a Cloud-based environment.
With internal and external pressures mounting to stay ahead in the market, customers nowadays are open to moving to cloud to ensure optimized cost while at the same time improve efficiency & increase collaboration among employees.
Excerpts of an email interaction with Ujal Nair
