Way to go, Satyam!

Readers of this blog must be pretty much used to my beating up India’s SWITCH (Satyam, Wipro, Infosys, TCS, Cognizant and HCL Tech) outsourcing vendors. Aligning IT with business strategy has, once again, become a top issue for companies worldwide. Despite the SLA requirements that IT outsourcing vendors will help clients develop IT strategies that deliver measurable business outcomes, clients don’t get to see much on the ground in terms of process/productivity improvements or LOB consulting insights.

But there seems to be a subtle shift happening. Or it could well be the beginning.

Hyderabad-based IT outsourcing vendor Satyam has signed up with Central Institute of Plastics Engineering and Technology (CIPET), an autonomous training and application research institute under the ministry of chemicals and fertilizers, for developing new engineering plastic materials through an industry-institute collaborative approach. The collaboration is part of Satyam's strategic initiative of developing a global ecosystem of alliances to provide total engineering solutions to its customers.

This is getting closer to the “end-to-end” services that most vendors profess they offer. Vendors should complement their rich portfolio of assets and processes with new services that provide greater insight into business performance. This is becoming particularly important as companies face new challenges in a variety of areas. IT vendors’ longevity depends on the quantum of load they take off the back of clients and upon themselves, acquiring capabilities on the run. In that we get new vendor efficiency metric – a combination of speed and magnitude of such offtake that ends with faster and effective post-process delivery with visible productivity improvements the client by itself couldn’t have hoped to achieve.

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