Official Title: Senior VP, Corio Technologies.
IMV: What do you focus on at Corio? What does your team do?
Chaddha: I’ve been with Corio for a year now, primarily running the technology side of the house. It is now a separated division called Corio Technologies. Our primary focus is building intellectual property that forms the basis of some of the services that Corio offers. One of the things that we do as an ASP is packetize and productize our services. My team focuses on the necessary effort to make that productization happen, including deployment, automation, and maintenance of applications. Basically we develop IT command-and-control applications that provide visibility and control to our customers into their environments hosted in our facilities.
IMV: What value do you add to Corio in your current role?
Chaddha: Corio is what I would call a pure play ASP. Some ASPs develop the applications that they provide, but Corio provides best-of-breed ERP and CRM applications to our customers. Therefore, the value in Corio is really application management services and infrastructure support as opposed to developing applications. The heart of Corio is our Operations Organization, which is in charge of rolling out applications and supporting our customers. However, in order to support our customers and their applications effectively, we can’t just throw labor at every solution to be deployed because we start behaving like one of many consulting houses. Our business model cannot be dependent on the number of employees and their hourly efficiency. We want to minimize the labor element but keep offering a high quality service to our customers. In order to make this happen, we need to invest in IT solutions that automate our business processes, like building and deploying a server, installing applications, applying patches, refreshing databases, etc. Since so many of the tasks are repetitive, we have created a software tool for automating workflow within Corio. The result is that a single individual can start a very complex workflow and most of the work is done automatically, similarly to an automated manufacturing plant.
As I mentioned before, my team is in charge of making Corio more efficient. Corio Technologies is in charge of building and deploying solutions that enable Corio to work with clients more efficiently. Another initiative that I drive is to provide our customers with a way to communicate with us and give them visibility into the status of the applications and environments that we manage for them. Right now you can think of it as a customer portal, but the scope is much broader than that.
IMV: In your efforts to eliminate the labor costs from your service efforts, what are some of the obstacles that you find?
Chaddha: The level of customization that some customers have in their applications requires a lot of human intelligence that cannot be automated. What is possible is to archive those customizations and store them until upgrades are needed. The process becomes a little more efficient and predictable because you are always starting from a stable version of the customer’s customized application. Our internal IP is a log and a knowledge base to track and store all those instances of customizations that I mentioned.
Another challenging area for our service that cannot be automated is the discovery phase that we have to go through when we start dealing with a new application. A good example is PeopleSoft 8, which came out a year ago and just now is starting to stabilize. In the meantime we were updating patches on every client manually and had to understand all the nuances of that version. Today it is stable enough for us to automate and store configurations.
IMV: Being close to high-tech and technology, are there any trends that you can identify for the next few quarters? (Technology trends and business trends)
Chaddha: Before I go into identifying trends in the short-term, it is important to discuss our current economic climate. There are at least 2 ways that I see the current climate impacting IT. First, there is a very common perception that over the last 5 to 10 years there has been an IT spending glut. A lot of large investments have been made with very little return or unrealized promises. Executive management is scrutinizing the inventory of IT assets and asking for the benefits that were originally attached to the investments. The CIO’s abilities to justify new IT initiatives are severely constrained by this new directive. The second big impact is the overall budget reductions that are occurring across companies of all industries and sizes. The economic reality is that the funding situation for IT projects is bleak. CIOs are spending more time picking and choosing their battles.
In this context, I think that the biggest trend in the short-term will be investments that make what’s already in place work better. CIOs will refocus on the “meat-and-potatoes” of their IT shops, which includes the ERP and CRM systems and making them work better, more efficiently. We are all seeing the new version of Siebel, which is all web-based, and the new versions of PeopleSoft, Oracle, and others. There is a lot of upgrade momentum right now, which is a tremendous opportunity for a company like Corio. Not only do we host and manage our clients’ applications, but we also offer quick and easy upgrades when the applications become stable.
Another trend that I see, even in my own company, is the focus on customer satisfaction. The initiatives that are still in my budget include projects that give our customers a high level of visibility and control of their IT environment that we are managing. This trend, however, is more common among service providers.
Some of the projects that I don’t see surviving budget cuts are some of the e-commerce initiatives that became popular in the last 3 years. I am not saying that e-business is dead; but I think that customers are trusting more in their ERP and CRM vendors to expand their offerings instead of venturing into untested solutions. I think it’s going to be challenging for emerging companies to gain a foothold in traditional markets by simply providing a slightly better mousetrap. Please remember that I am referring to a short-term timeline (12-18 months).
In summary, a few of the technology trends that I am seeing:
Upgrading existing applications to improve the benefits they already provide
Security, specially proactive security solutions and layered solutions
Standards-based integration or the third wave of EAI, not proprietary solutions
In terms of market or business trends:
Increased focus on quantified, accounted ROI
Client’s demand for measurable Service Level Agreements (SLA), with hard dollar penalties for not meeting agreements. Ironclad SLAs will be standard in service contracts
Centralized IT organizations, but distributed IT spending accountability. Large organizations are creating IT service units that internal departments “hire” for projects
Repetitive, tedious activities or processes inside the enterprise are being automated or outsourced to Managed Service Providers (MSP) locally and even offshore.
As I mentioned in the beginning, Corio Technologies is automating many of our service processes through technology. We have also outsourced some of our internal processes offshore.
IMV: Thanks a lot for your time.
Backgrounder: Parmeet Chaddha, ranked among the top 50 IT Executives by InfoWorld, brings to Corio more than 12 years of information technology and general management experience in the areas of Enterprise Applications, Internet Infrastructure, Distributed Systems and Database Management Systems. Parmeet comes to Corio from MarketMakers, Inc. where he was the co-founder and CIO. He has also worked as the founder and President of Zanza Software, Inc., a web based Business Intelligence company. Parmeet has been instrumental in creating one of the first commercial websites’ during his tenure as VP of Engineering at Intellimatch, Inc., a provider of online information services for recruitment. Prior to this, Parmeet was Director of R&D and Computer Operations at Datis Corporation, a health-care information systems company.
Parmeet began his professional career at Oracle Corporation as a technical analyst in the Financial and Manufacturing applications group. Here he managed and worked on the product line for Oracle CASE tools. Parmeet has published several articles and papers. He holds a Masters of Science and a Bachelor of Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
About Corio: Corio (Nasdaq: CRIO) is a leading enterprise application service provider and delivers best-of-breed enterprise applications over a secure global network for a fixed fee on a fixed scope and with a fixed timeline. Corio's experts deploy and manage applications from leading software vendors such as PeopleSoft, Oracle, SAP, SAP Markets and Siebel Systems. Corio designs and deploys scalable, one-to-many architectures built using world-class infrastructure. Corio SRVCE(TM) enables customers to achieve superior speed, reliability, visibility, control and economics for their enterprise applications. Corio is located in San Carlos, California.
