India is a flagship delivery location for HP!

Sumanth Tarigopula,
Director, Best Shore,
Application Services, HP

What is the global trend when it comes to outsourcing? Where does India stand as the global delivery hub? 

There is a rising trend in mature clients asking less about delivery locations and more about total cost, value, innovations and service levels. The trend shows that there is more interest in “mixed shore” solutions, whereby services are offered from more than one location.

They expect the service provider to source the best talent from the best possible location and deliver to them seamlessly. That said, there are still many clients who have a strong location preference. India remains the number 1 choice for most clients, which is reflected in the investment decisions for most IT providers. India's dominance is due to continued labour arbitrage, large and diversified labour pool, and high maturity of the offshore services industry. Everest Group says that outsourcing customers should stop looking for the “next India” because it does not exist. In the case of providers looking to expand beyond India, they still leverage India as a primary hub for large-scale offshore delivery, supporting multiple business units and functions. However, while India remains at the forefront of outsourcing, clients often want an India + 1 delivery model or a multi-country delivery model. At HP, India is our flagship delivery location, but we continue to invest and grow in many other cost advantageous countries offering our clients access to the best talent pools across the world.

What kind of contribution in applications comes from India's hub out of all the HP hubs? 

India is our flagship delivery location, accounting for a significant chunk of our delivery resources. It is the biggest offshore Application and Business Services Delivery Center for Enterprise Services in HP. Depending on the nature and maturity of client engagement, specific phase in the life cycle and resource and language mix, HP arrives at the most optimized engagement model drawing teams from the interconnected global onshore, near-shore and best-shore hubs.  

Over the years, the India hub has actively delivered services and contributed value to the entire portfolio of Application and Business Services. The portfolio consists of the following major offerings:

1. Application Development and Management Services, including Testing and Quality Assurance Services 

2. Enterprise Application Services comprising Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics and SAP Enterprise Application and Management 

3. Strategic Enterprise Services - This is further divided into the following focussed affinity group of services: 

What all falls under the HP Enterprise Services (ES) gamut?

HP Enterprise comprises hardware, software, services, networking and solutions designed to help businesses and governments create their own “Instant-On Enterprise”. Today, customers and citizens expect everything in an instant. In a world of continuous connectivity, they require products, services and information faster and more reliable than ever before. The Instant-On Enterprise delivers differentiated competitive advantage and serves customers, employees, partners and citizens with whatever they want and need, instantly. It is an enterprise with agility that learns swiftly and continuously to close the gap between what customers and citizens expect and what the enterprise can deliver. It is an enterprise that embeds technology into everything it does or delivers in order to best serve citizens, partners, employees and clients. 

The ability to support or provide these technologies and services varies by country. HP Enterprise Services offers integrated solutions and services across industries for applications, business processes and infrastructure. Therefore, HP Enterprise Services - in addition to the Application and Business Services - has two other critical services - Business Process Services and Infrastructure Services (ITO).

*  Business Process Services broadly covers Customer Relationship Management, Document Processing Services, Finance and Administration Services and HR and Payroll Services. 

*  Infrastructure Services covers Data Center Services, Enterprise Service Management, Networking Services, Security Services and Workplace Services. 

How is HP Application Services' redefining and leading the industry?

We believe that we must continue to be the best in traditional application development and management services across all industries. Increasingly, we are seeing that enterprises need quickly turn into Instant-On Enterprises. We must think beyond cloud and mobility. The Strategic Enterprise Services are aimed to realize the dream of building extended Instant-On enterprises. This covers industry solutions that address these needs through combination of cloud, mobility, lightweight SOA and real-time analytics services. Traditionally, the pure play vendors as well as end-to-end service integrators like HP have been delivering from siloed disconnected centers, using traditional factory-based and contract-based models. The customer engagement is minimal. The focus on delivering against negotiated person-efforts from the skilled resources than delivering outcomes. It is the age-old capacity management paradigm that results in waste and inflexibility. 

These centers are designed to define and deliver outcome-based industry solutions for the customer and enterprises in a connected world. It does this by delivering secure, seamless and context aware experiences that help our clients. This helps optimize their traditional environments, build and manage cloud-based architectures, create mobile enterprise, and enable seamless transformation from current legacy to hybrid models. 

How will HP leverage the HP Global Center India capabilities to extend innovation leadership across its current product and services portfolio?

It is part of our DNA to constantly remind and ask ourselves if there is a better-faster-cheaper-quicker way of doing something. This results in innovations that solve customer problems. It has rewards, hall-of-fame, peer networks, technology fests and conferences that foster innovations everyday on the delivery floors. To drive innovation, automation and quality, we leverage HP differentiated software and a strong, extensive partner ecosystem.

India centers also have the additional advantage of actively collaborating amoung co-located team members from centers representing various HP software and hardware products, services and HP Labs. The local multi-day, multi-discipline technical collaboration events engage engineers and researchers to work on creating differentiating applications combining HP intellectual property across different groups in India.

Syeda Beenish 
beenish@varindia.com