Anurag Mehrotra, CEO, CMS IT Services outlines his successes notwithstanding the large Tier-1 IT service providers.
What are the solutions and services offered by CMS IT Services in managed services and as a system integrator?
CMS IT is a system integrator primarily focused in the domestic market.
We set up the IT infrastructure for our customers, design it, implement it and roll it out, then sustain it for a period of time.
We are a system integrator and being a part of it, we provide system integration services, break fix services and managed IT services. The genesis of why I have joined CMS and reach where we are now is primarily because in the last 7-8 years all tier one companies have revisited their India strategy and d-efocused for the domestic market and tier 2 has vanished.
When I joined CMS in 2013, we were only working on break fix but now we are a full-fledged system integrator.
Why have the Indian IT services players defocused from Indian while the global MNCs focus more on India?
The tier 2 companies vanished and the tier 1 companies revisited their strategies for many reasons. Second point is the Indian MNCs have de-focused from India and the global MNC’s are focusing in India, the reason being for Indian IT companies, the global market is far more lucrative and all Indian companies in 2008, 2009, 2010 bid for government projects and ran into huge outstanding and that really forced then to revisit their strategies.
For the global IT companies, their main focus is on the products.
What makes CMS stick in the market is that our value proposition is very simple, we have an execution capability of a large company. We are also able to personalize our services to our customers.
What are CMS’ horizontal execution capabilities for your system integration offerings?
Looking at the key technologies, one is the ability to setup a data center for our customers which necessary calls for system integration of various pieces of technology. We have executed three products in terms of executing a private cloud for our customer. That’s what we provide as all large enterprise will not accept public cloud for their key applications. Every enterprise is looking forward to having a hybrid model private cloud so there we are a very active player for our customers.
In terms of security, for a large customer we implemented 17 solution for security. So these are the areas we are working with our customers.
Which are the key verticals where the system integration business sees maximum traction?
Our business is primarily horizontal because we are setting up infrastructure for our customers. BFSI is a big vertical for us, utilities is a vertical for us, FMCG is a vertical and manufacturing is also a vertical but we don’t really measure our revenue in multiple terms, we measure that in the horizontal services we do which of the areas we play around our customers.
How does CMS look at exposure to government projects?
We have a very limited presence in the government space and as far as government is concern we break it up into two one is PSU’s and second in purely government entities and government organizations.
Our play here is very limited. We have a very simple principal that is unless and until we have a relationship with our customer before the tender and the customer knows us or we know them we don’t engage with the government. Where we are sure we can execute our project and pick up our money, only there we work.
How did the personalization and relationship aspect with customers help you during the pandemic?
The customer needs to be comfortable dealing with the service provider, personalization at a large extent is giving comfort to the customer that the service provider is with them all the time.
During the pandemic, the same challenge was there so we were able to fulfill that as we have that flexibility in terms of how we operate. But more importantly, the flexibility that the customer saw was a massive effort that CMS IT made to move lot of onsite services and deliver it remotely.
The pandemic became an opportunity for us to deepen our relation with the customer. Secondly, the long lasting impact of this pandemic will be the customers. They will become more comfortable with remote services, so hope this pandemic has delivered this message to the customer that this onsite model is not a sustainable model. This will be a gradual change.
How can a mid-size company like CMS manage the challenge of linear growth?
We are hoping that as we move into the future, people will be a lot more open to non-linearity in their services by going more and more remote. So, it will be a challenge and not something that can be overcome over-night.
How were the existing SLAs impacted during the pandemic?
At the time of the lockdown there was a SLA holiday but now the customers are back to being normal and to the extent being a little unreasonable. There are customers who understand that this is an issue and we are working towards a solution and then there are customers who are unreasonable and they don’t care, now fortunately most of our customers are being reasonable so it’s a solution that you try to find as the situation develops.
The next quarter is not going to be easy as cases are spiking now and it will take time to sub size.
How did the CMS sales and marketing engine manage to transform themselves digitally and balance between existing customers and acquiring new customers?
As an organization, one thing that we did very well was our outreach to our prospects and to our customers through digital medium. This lock down became a good time for us to reach to more and more prospects and make our impact.
Secondly, while the outreach was there it has not lead to too many closures because the customer business has also impacted. Thirdly, our focus is now to sell to more and more to our existing customer as their relationship is in place.
What was the problem of closures not matching digital outreach for CMS?
We didn’t have too many closure out of the digital outreach. Otherwise we did business and under the circumstances we did reasonably good business.
How were the CMS internal workforce aligned digitally?
We did a lot of work to align digitally for example the digital outreach we did. Now outreach is one part next is how we track that outreach. So we used the lockdown to implement a robust CRM system so that all customer interaction opportunities are there available in CRM. Now this has become the primary platform for engagement with our customers.
What will be their typical use cases for the top clients?
One is implementing private cloud, defensible cyber security, that’s a big area we play with.
Second is automation and manage services is a concern which has fueled our growth and we are a leader in the market.
Can you elaborate on some of the aspects of the automation framework?
This automation has two or three elements to it. One is proactive support; second is once the problem occurs how it can be solved quickly by using bots, AI and so on. Third is how do we implement a frame work which is, customer specific. We have a frame work that tackles all this and we have implemented this.
How much your workforce is managed from smaller cities and how are you geographically spread?
We are geographically spread because the services we offer to our customers have to be pan India as we have customers from all across India. Take any BFSI customer they are present in every nook and cranny of the country. One of our value proposition is we provide pan India support. Being present pan India has its challenges like spreading your infrastructure across but we are managing it and we have been successful.
How differently CMS is doing things from Tier 1 service providers and what are the main milestones planned in the next 1-2 quarters?
We have managed to be a customer focused organization.
A large company as it grows, it becomes more in-ward looking as your own process are more important than what you need to do for our customers. As CMS is a small company, it is easy to make it more customer focused and that is what we have managed to do.
The primary goals for the next two to three quarters they are very simple, how to deepen our relation with existing customers and do more for them. Secondly, moving to cloud.
How would you meet the regulatory challenges coming in multiple verticals?
It’s a challenge. Since it’s a compliance issue, you have to do it there are no other options.
What would be your message for the CIOs of enterprises for the next one year?
One is to look at more and more remote services as compared to an onsite model and second is to have quality of service as that will be important as we move forward.
These are the two areas which will need a lot of focus and retention, organization will have to be conscious about this things and the other is movement to cloud.