Key Findings & Highlights:

Noida, India headquartered NIIT Technologies (NIIT Tech) was founded to provide software and IT services. Initially, part of NIIT, the largest IT training company in India, in 2004 NIIT Tech was spun off as an independent public company, to pursue the IT services industry.

NIIT Tech services clients in travel and transportation, banking and financial services, insurance, manufacturing, and media verticals, offering services including application development and maintenance, infrastructure management, and business process management.

NIIT Tech has supported clients’ digital transformation journeys since the early 2000s, but Digital Services was formed as a horizontal unit in 2015.

Prior to the formal development of the digital services horizontal, NIIT Tech had begun building a user experience centric capability in 2014 to span both experience consulting and the technological capabilities required to support it. In part, these UX and digital marketing skills which were acquired through a 2011 joint venture launched with Morris Communications. These skilled resources include accredited UX architects/designers with, on average, ~15 years of experience and backgrounds in, for example, aeronautics, airlines, banking, travel and transport, finance, e-commerce, insurance, media.

NelsonHall estimates that digital transformation revenues account for ~25% of NIIT Tech’s total CY 2017 revenues (~$120m). Of this, NelsonHall estimates that ~20% (~$24m) of these digital transformation revenues are associated with UX-UI consulting and implementation services.

NIIT Tech focuses digital experience offerings across the following areas:

• E-commerce
• User experience design
• Omni-channel
• Portals, including extract, transform, and load (ETL) features for managing data
• Social integration
• Mobility, including responsive websites and native mobile applications.

NIIT Tech’s UX methodology includes two major phases:

User experience: spanning both UX assessment services and UX design services

Omni-channel development: spanning web portal and mobile app development.

NIIT Tech has ~9.4k FTEs. Of this headcount, ~65% (~6k FTEs) is focused on application development and maintenance activities, which supports digital implementation engagements. 80% of these application and development resources are located in India.

NIIT Tech’s creative team includes:

• Visual design (including print and digital): ~160 FTEs
• Advertising Operations: ~10 FTEs
• Digital marketing: ~10 FTEs.

This team has ~70% of its resources located in India with the remainder located near its clients in the U.S. and EMEA.

With a primary focus on verticals that took early focus on customer experience initiatives including BFS, travel and transport and insurance, NIIT Tech has been an early adopter of UX and design thinking. This has provided them with a strong set of credentials in building customer-facing properties for clients, in particular, mobile and omnichannel properties. By maintaining a focus on these industries rather than looking to expand through moving into new areas, NIIT Tech has been able to develop differentiated capabilities for clients.

It is also beginning to see a shift as clients look to incorporate UX design beyond customer-facing properties and in internal applications or end to end services. While it is building experiences in support of internal initiatives, NIIT Tech will need to focus on continuing to build these capabilities to maintain pace with their clients evolving focus.

NIIT Tech has also remained concentrated in the geographic presence of its UX design capabilities. While this enables them to build a critical mass and standardize approaches, tools, and methodologies it also acts as a constraint in different regions. Even within Europe, cultural approaches to both design thinking and UX expectations can vary, something NIIT Tech will have seen supporting German clients with Spanish and English UX teams. Targeted geographic expansion of UX skills would be beneficial in tailoring products and processes to individual cultures.

NIIT Tech is positioning itself well as the definition of customer experience evolves. As more interactions move to voice-based, screenless interfaces, its experiences, and capabilities in NLI will position itself ahead of competitors still focused primarily on traditional screen-based UX.