Sushil Rathi, Co-Founder, Anantara Solutions, Chennai

Sushil Rathi wanted to start his own business while he was still an MBA student in 1985. The venture couldn't take off due to one of the partner backing off at the last moment but the entrepreneur in him remained in continuum- for 21 long years- albeit in a dormant stage. So in 2007, after spending 15 years in auto industry and another six years in IT business process consulting, he co-founded a company, called Anantara Solutions (Sanskrit for Continuum). 

"Anantara is a pioneer in Second Generation Outsourcing (SGO) in India.

SGO is a multi-pronged value proposition, several prongs not dealt with at all in first generation

outsourcing. While it represents continuity with the strengths of first generation outsourcing, it also represents a radical leap from the current era in many other senses.

Rather than claiming to be a one stop in-house solution for all kind of Business and IT solutions, we partner with best of the experts in various verticals such as manufacturing, retail, convergence, supply chain and logistics, web 2.0, enterprise content management, media and entertainment, and BFSI ( Banking, Financial Services and Insurance), to give

Significantly enhanced business value to customer arising from superior solutions architecture," says Rathi.

"SGO helps us maintain a lean work force, cut down on overheadslikeoffice expenses and also give the best value proposition to our customers based on risk-reward pricing rather than cost arbitrage, which has no-takers now. The bigger question faced by all IT giants now is: how do you sustain your large infrastructure investments and 50,000 plus work-force on cost arbitrage model when there is a global financial meltdown resulting in demand slowdown?"

Second Generation Outsourcing surely seems the way forward. An important marker of SGO is value-based pricing whereby Anantara would collect a large part of its intended fees based on the actual business value it creates for clients, and risk-reward relationships make Anantara a part of the client's IT and business investment risk. Rathi gave an example where Anantara Solutions is working on reducing the cost of supply-chain and logistics of FMCG client, a behemoth, whose turnover is in excess of USD$ 1 billion. "Once we deliver the solution, much to the satisfaction of the company, we get a certain percentage of the savings accrued to customer as our variable fee."

Anantara's pedigree can be traced to seven partners, who were core members of consulting and enterprising division of Satyam Computers in Chennai, and had built a US$ 200 million consulting and outsourcing business from scratch in about a decade.

No wonder that they got seed capital funding of US$ 6.5 million from Helion Venture Partners when they formed a separate company in end 2006.

However, the company had its share of struggle in the initial months. "Translating the concept into reality was tough initially," says Rathi. "Sourcing right partners was quite a task. We had to sell the idea of SGO to them to create the right ecosystem of experts from different verticals

Today, after almost two years of inception, Anantara Solutions has more than 40 partners in 8 countries in its ecosystem. Anantara today has 5000 strong workforce along with its various partners serving more than 40 customers in 17 countries. Company has shown over 100% YoY growth in the first financial year 2007-08 and has already set up offices in Mumbai, Chennai, Singapore, US, and UK.

The company gets its 50% revenue from international market and 50% from India.

"We have a global business delivery model in true sense unlike other IT companies where employees from India travel to other international locations on project basis," says Rathi. Apart from US and Western Europe, the traditional business hubs, Company has partners in places such as Canada, Malta, and Russia and uses the local competency and technical know-how to execute projects.

The prime tenet of Anantara's philosophy is to partner with its clients using innovative models of engagement. The accent is not just on IT benefits but on a whole host of business benefits. Realizing strategic imperatives in the form of measurable business value, through Business Solutions, is a cornerstone of Anantara's engagement philosophy.

"In terms of consulting, Anantara not only does strategic analysis and planning interventions, but also provides hands on support for implementing eSourcing Capability Model for Service Providers (eSCM SP). Anantara is a Carnegie Mellon authorised organisation for eSCM," says Rathi.

"Malta or Satara in Maharashtra (company has done a project on LCV for an auto component company), we believe in delivering unprecedented, measurable business value to our clients," signs off Rathi.