Shankaran Nair, President – Corporate Strategy and Head Global Delivery, Servion Global Solutions joined the company in 2003. He holds a bachelor's degree in economics from Loyola College, Chennai and a master's in management (marketing) from the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Bangalore, India. He has been instrumental in setting up the Business Development practice at Servion for the Asia Pacific region. Shankaran Nair brings a unique blend of entrepreneurial capability and professional management training and skills. He has played a key role in the re-organization and restructuring of the approach to business planning at Servion.
Servion Global Solutions is specialized in CIM (Customer Interaction Management) that helps organizations design and deliver superior customer experience and map end-to-end CIM solutions to address the specific business needs of its customers. Servion, headquartered in Chennai started off as a value added reseller of hardware in 1995 with ten employees and has grown to over 450 people strong evolving itself into an organization with powerful intellectual property in the Customer Interaction Management (CIM) domain. The company has presence in 5 continents and has set up over 1000 installations for 600 clients across 60 countries. The company handles more than 7 billion customer interactions annually and more than 50% of telecom industry service calls in India.
Replying to Yash Ved of IIFL, Shankaran Nair says “We are seeing a renewal of pipeline as well as strong growth at the moment and believe this will continue.”
What outlook do you see for IT industry for 2012-13?
The outlook is going to be varied in different parts of the world depending on the economic outlook. Based on our experience in the last few months, we believe the overall outlook is positive. We are seeing a renewal of pipeline as well as strong growth at the moment and believe this will continue. Cautious optimism perhaps captures the mood best.
Brief us about the Consulting Services, Managed Services, and Application development services growth?
All these lines of business are growing strongly. Most of our strategic wins include all these lines of business and since our focus is on building long term partnering engagements with our clients, we have an opportunity to build them all within each engagement. Our overall engagement cycle is best described as Design- Deploy- Optimize. At the design stage, consulting plays a strong role. The deployment stage is predominantly about application development and system integration. And in the optimize phase, the managed services delivery arm comes into play with input again from consulting. All three lines of business are growing at 30% – 40%.
What are your plans in India and other geographies?
Servion is a pioneer in the domain in India – having brought in the first two IVRs into the country back in 1995-96 for the DoT and then Indian railways. We work with practically every telecom company in the country and a large number of banks and financial institutions. We partner with both Cisco and Avaya. And work with a host of global IT outsourcers as well like IBM, TCS, HP. Our plans in India are to remain focused on large enterprise class customers, long term engagements directly and/or in alignment with our partners.
Our strategy in APAC and the Middle East pretty much mirrors our approach in India where too we have a network of alliances and strategic partners plus direct customers. In the US we work with a wide array of both Avaya and Cisco business partners. Our intention is to build a more direct go to market model in the US – we have been very successful in this initiative in the last one year.
Give us geographic break up of revenues?
About 35% of our revenue comes from US, 25% of revenue comes from India, and remaining 40% of revenue comes from APAC and ME
Brief us about your agreement with Avaya?
Servion and Avaya have signed a Direct Partner Agreement under the Avaya Connect Global Channel Partner Program. The focus of the companies’ collaboration and go-to-market will be on augmenting customer experience for companies across India.
Avaya and Servion will focus on several verticals like travel, entertainment, transportation, retail, healthcare and government which have been relatively slow to adopt Customer Interaction Management solutions. Customer experience, which is seamlessly delivering what customer expects, is targeted as a key differentiator to drive faster adoption among these verticals.
What are your hiring plans?
We started the financial year with some 450 people and will close with over 550. We are growing strongly – over 40% year on year – and expect to continue to expand our work force with specific reference to the delivery function in line with that growth.