At its 2019 Engage Client Forum last week, NIIT Technologies explained how it is adapting to a continuously changing business and technology environment to deliver digital transformation for its clients.

At its 2019 Engage Client Forum, NIIT Technologies explained how it is adapting to a continuously changing business and technology environment to deliver digital transformation for its clients.

Four key strategies

NIIT Tech identified four key strategies it is pursuing:

• Hyperspecialize in key industries: NIIT Tech has chosen the Insurance, BFS, and Travel industries to focus on. Its teams have adapted their approach from bringing technology to clients to analyzing business problems and bringing in technology to solve a business challenge
• Involute: Tying together cognitive, data, automation/integration, and cloud to accelerate value creation. NIIT Tech believes the next phase of digital transformation in the industry will require stitching together the entire business process with cognitive and digital technology to eliminate bottlenecks which have reduced value creation in past industry reengineering engagements   
• Moving the center of gravity closer to the client: by onshoring increasingly, and setting up delivery centers specialized in key industry processes (e.g. the center in Boise, Idaho which specializes in digital integration and Pega services)  
• Building a partner ecosystem: clients, including tier ones, have indicated they have difficulty curating an effective technology partner ecosystem. NIIT Tech helps them by scanning the field in a small set of industry domains for solution vendors who offer a product which can be integrated into NIIT Tech client domains in a way that provides agility, lower cost, and digital functionality for the client. The key attribute is solutions that approach problem-solving from a business perspective rather than from a technology perspective. Present at the conference were four FinTech partners:
  • Steeleye: compliance technology and data analytics vendor
  • Fennech: treasury solution for allocating and reconciling bulk payment allocations  
  • Appii: employment background check and validation platform which uses blockchain for CV verification   
  • Duco: data management solution vendor for data normalization, migration, regulation, and reconciliation.

Banking sector focus

NIIT Tech is building proprietary IP to drive forward its digital services initiatives. Key to the banking industry is:

• Open-source software. Key examples include:
  • Infrastructure-as-a-code: NIIT Tech uses Terraform, which is an open source infrastructure as code software tool created by HashiCorp. It enables users to define and provision a data center infrastructure, and it works with most cloud provider environments, including AWS, Azure, Google, and IBM
  • Core banking platform: NIIT Tech uses BankingEasy,  a cloud and web-based, multi-user, multi-currency and real-time, modular, core banking platform. The platform runs on n-tier, service-oriented architecture on Microsoft Azure.
• Application performance management framework: this tool helps clients with heterogeneous legacy environments to manage application lifecycles more efficiently to improve application behavior in a complex operations environment by analyzing the monitored data for the entire relevant operations environment giving real-time performance visibility across the application development lifecycle. It also informs how the application performance is impacting a client’s business and identify areas which require immediate attention. The framework is powered using AI and automation capabilities, thus reducing manual efforts and enabling teams to focus on product innovation.
• Jumpstart analytics: NIIT Tech via its jumpstart analytical offerings, Maestro and Xpresssssss, helps clients modernize their data landscape by setting up data lakes, and migrate their legacy data warehouses to cloud technologies (AWS, Azure, GCP, etc.). Their data science library of pre-set use cases (e.g., credit scoring, fraud detection, customer/advisor churn, etc.) enable clients to realize business objectives via advanced data science techniques.  

The client view

During the conference, I spoke with many clients about their activities with NIIT Tech, providing the following feedback:

• NIIT Tech is starting U.S.-based training programs to support reskilling the client’s employees
• It is willing to co-invest with clients in projects by spending 2 to 4 weeks working on use case development without charging for the engagement
• NIIT Tech employees are moving from a labor-based delivery mindset to a business outcome-based mindset, which more closely matches the client’s approach to challenges.    Clients want vendors to proactively provide suggestions, which NIIT Tech is increasingly providing. NIIT Tech can provide both labor capacity and capability as required rapidly when they have spike demand for resources   
• Cloud data management services can drive major operational improvements. One asset manager stated that their quant investment team was able to reduce the daily computational time required to drive their quant strategies from 19 hours to 1 hour per day
• NIIT Tech is providing support for moving to a poly-cloud environment (i.e. multiple third-party cloud vendors). NIIT Tech’s Infrastructure-as-a-code offering is effective for working in a poly-cloud environment.  

Summary

NIIT Tech is transforming itself to capture digital transformation opportunities and is investing heavily in IP and partnerships. It has built IP using open source code, which delivers solution modules that can be deployed with 40% less cost, time, and effort.

The key to NIIT Tech’s success has been its ability to deliver services and outcomes quickly and effectively. Accordingly, NIIT Tech’s employee training and digital tools all focus on delivering functionality and high speed. As one NIIT Tech executive put it, “Data is king, speed is emperor”.