The Hindu Business Line : Prabhat set for `second' innings

Life, for Mr G.B. Prabhat, has come a full circle since co-founding Satyam Renaissance Consulting in 1995. After quitting Satyam Computer Services as Director, Consulting and Enterprise Solutions Division this October, Mr Prabhat, 41, is now set to become entrepreneur again.

His new venture, yet to be named, will offer what he calls `Second Generation Outsourcing' services. He is also putting together a top quality management team.

"It is time to rethink the current outsourcing model," he told Business Line.

"The SGO, or Next Generation Outsourcing, will be different on three counts: It would see a shift from an asset-heavy model to an asset-light model; Vendors would pick up full responsibility for business results they create; and, they would go on to provide intense knowledge management rather than data management."

Demand for value

Cost arbitrage in the offshore model is being eliminated, he said, and hence there is unprecedented pressure on software vendors to deliver value. "The current nature of outsourcing won't die in a hurry, but customer demand for value is getting shriller." He added that the SGO is an inclusive model. "It would retain the good of the current model but is not merely an incremental improvement on it."

Explaining the three legs that the SGO would stand on, he said, "Software companies might historically have bought real estate at low rates. But increasingly, it comes at a price. Take away even 50 per cent of real estate that companies use and there would still be no impact on the quality of deliverables."

Value-based pricing

The second leg on which the model would stand is value-based pricing.

He said, "Vendors ought to be paid based on the value they help generate for clients. Technology investment cannot be an end in itself, but a means."

He added that clients needed tools that would define business value in every project, along with processes and methodologies to measure that value.

The third leg would be knowledge management. Here, he said, artificial intelligence and expert systems would be imposed on business intelligence solutions, in order to increase automation in managerial decision-making.

Data management is now mature and robust, he said. "We have sucked the juices out of data management which now only gives diminishing returns.

"If a patient consults a doctor for symptoms of pneumonia, existing systems help with diagnosis by throwing up different diseases that have that particular symptom. Now, it is possible to tell the doctor to look for other symptoms so that a combination could result in a new diagnosis." Expertise culled over millennia moves into a system that newer doctors could tap into easily.

At the time of quitting, he was heading Satyam's Consulting and Enterprise Solutions division which, with 3,500 people, serviced clients across verticals, with skills in business process consulting, knowledge management, CRM, content and portals, supplier relationship management and grid computing, among others.

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