Global
In a recent article with Smart CEO, Ranjit Tinaikar, Chief Executive Officer, discusses the transformation of Ness into a full lifecycle digital engineering partner. Ness’ transformation story is about making what you are good at even better through the transformation of people processes, hiring fresh talent, and acquiring complementary businesses.
Building on Core Strengths
“We have a good foundation in product engineering, which we continue to cherish and evolve. But on this foundation, we have the three pillars of our strategy, which is, to grow our existing accounts with high-value advisory services; become more industry-specialized in the way we go to market around four focused verticals, and build competencies in cloud and data and analytics,” said Ranjit Tinaikar. Ness has zeroed in on financial services, manufacturing & transportation, media & communications, and technology & ISVs as its core focus areas. Its vision is to become one of the top five pure-play digital transformation specialists leveraging its large team of 3,500 employees to be a digital engineering specialist. This is accomplished by building on its current strength of product engineering and creating the flexibility to allow new thinking to come into the organization and take root. It hopes to achieve this by hiring fresh talent and capabilities as well as acquiring organizations. “We are changing our people processes and encouraging people to invest in new ideas and innovation,” Tinaikar explained.
This approach has worked well for Ness as it has created its proprietary engineering SaaS platform called, Matrix, which combines and analyzes data sources from multiple software engineering platforms to provide intelligent business insights and reveal any bottlenecks. Within just 12 months, it has been rolled out across 20-30 percent of its clients as a bundled offering and has become a standard for all new Ness clients. The team is also developing an AI-based solution to analyze system failures better and identify the root cause to improve the response times.
Key Acquisitions
As part of its transformation and to meet its objectives, the company made a key acquisition of Risk Focus. Headquartered in New York, Risk Focus is a leading digital transformation consulting and advisory firm specializing in financial services. Risk Focus creates measurable business impact with technology expertise, business insight, and an iterative delivery process. The company is an Advanced AWS Partner with the Financial Services, Migration, and DevOps competencies and a Premier Confluent Systems Integrator.
Vassil Avramov, the founder and CEO of Risk Focus, has been appointed as Ness CTO to drive all its digital transformation practices around advisory, consulting services in experience design data, cloud, machine learning, and all such areas. Joel Scotkin of Risk Focus is the Head of Strategy and brings a deep knowledge of how to transform a services company into a highly specialized, value-added company.
Valuing its Team
Tinaikar believes that talent is the lifeline of a services company, and sometimes even more important than customers because a company grows because of its talent. “We are changing our programs around learning and development and career tracks. We have decided we will not expose our talent to the ups and downs of the industry by following hiring and firing but take care of our people regardless of the variations in the volume of business we do with our clients,” he says firmly.
From Strength to Strength
Tinaikar also believes in three rules of change management: to celebrate the core competency, define a very clear direction while letting the leaders decide the pace and level of change, and bring in new talent and take the risk of change.
By 2025, apart from being considered among the top three to five digital engineering specialists, Ness expects to grow at 20 percent every year by investing in the right talent and capabilities and have a team size of 7,000 people.
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