The Hindu Business Line : Polaris advised to focus on legacy modernisation

POLARIS Software has said that management consulting firm McKinsey & Co has validated its intellectual property (IP)-based business model and has advised the company to stay focussed on the legacy modernisation services, where one sees big growth in the financial services space.

The Chennai-based mid-sized IT firm had appointed McKinsey & Co in mid-2005 to do a strategy validation, and to inform whether it was on the right path.

Mr Arun Jain, Chairman and Managing Director, Polaris, told Business Line recently that McKinsey has validated what the company has been doing over the past one-and-half-years since the OrbiTech's merger. "Our productisation strategy was validated earlier by our customers and now by McKinsey," he said.

McKinsey, Mr Jain said, believed that the legacy modernisation space in which Polaris operated was uniquely available to the company over next 18-24 months. "We need to do fast branding to get a quiet mindshare in this space rather than in the pure services space the Indian companies are focussing at," Mr Jain said.

Polaris, Mr Jain said, was seeing great traction with an increasing client visits over the last three months. "In the last 9 months, we have signed up 10-11 large banks. This could be the largest no of banks signed in a single year," Mr Jain said.

"We are excited about the next few quarters. I think we have to undergo churn for the remaining one or two quarters. The transformation has already begun paying off as the number of new prospective client visits has increased. Converting these visitors into revenues and bottom line is two to six quarters away. It will be visible in two quarters but the impact will be six quarters away," Mr Jain said.

McKinsey has also suggested Polaris to do effective account mining, i.e., focus on getting additional business from the existing customers, Mr Jain added.

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