President Vikas Sehgal explains how Nagarro has accumulated some of the industry’s most talented individuals and is driven to produce cutting edge solutions
Written by Gabe Perna
Often in life, those with a gift will challenge themselves to the absolute brink of difficulty. This is the case from athletics to the scientific world and the work being done at Nagarro certainly fits into this category.
For anyone with a gift in software technology development, the place to be is Nagarro. The global company headquartered in San Jose, CA, is a leader in providing technology services addressing the complex business needs of its customers.
“The kind of work we take on is the most challenging, most complex custom software development work out there, and therefore we’re able to get the best talent in industry. It’s this kind of work that motivates them. By maintaining a high benchmark or threshold for the kind of work we take on, we’ve been able to attract the best talent since the best talent is motivated by these challenging assignments,” says Vikas Sehgal, President and CEO of Nagarro.
Simply put, pencil pushers need not apply.
In a synergistic way, the company (and its customers) benefit from having the top talent as much as the top talent benefit from being with the company. Sehgal, who holds an engineering degree in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, says the company is able to pick up some of the toughest, most complex projects since they require the best talent.
With this type of atmosphere, it’s no shock Nagarro is a multiple award winner for employee satisfaction. Most recently the company was recognized as the Employer of Choice in NASSCOM Survey of Emerging IT Firms. “We’ve created a work environment which is very intellectually vigorous, very challenging for the best in the industry. The awards we have received speak to that,” says Sehgal.
Bread and butter
The company’s selling points don’t end with having procured the industry’s premier talent. Under Sehgal’s vision and leadership, Nagarro has emerged as a global industry leader with offices in the US, Europe and India with plans for other offices in the works. Specializing in providing services for software startups, as well as midsize and large enterprises across numerous industries, the company brings a unique mixture of domain and technology expertise to solve business critical challenges of its clients.
Sehgal stresses the importance of the software his company develops for its clients. It is one thing for a customer to outsource software development for a support function, but it takes an entirely different level of trust to work with a vendor to develop a core product offering, or software for a business critical function that their organization runs on. These custom software applications often solve a particular business need or make the company more competitive by enhancing automation, reducing costs, optimizing processes, reducing R&D time to name a few. For software startups, Nagarro is a driving force in bringing its customers software products to market successfully. For those companies, these software products and applications are, as Sehgal says, “their bread and butter.”
“We can look at problems at a very high level, understand the customer’s challenges and their demand, and not only build software solutions but suggest what solutions will give them a competitive advantage, will improve process efficiencies or help bring their products to market faster. For all our engagements, we can come in as consultants and figure out what kind of technology or software solutions are needed to achieve their business goals and objectives before we build the products or applications,” explains Sehgal.
A number of Nagarro’s customers are pursuing green initiatives. Often times, Nagarro is able to help these customers by designing software solutions that reduce the customer’s carbon footprint and give them a better environmental stamp. For example, Nagarro can develop software designed to optimize manufacturing processes and hence reduce toxic chemical waste or increase transportation efficiency in truck routes. These are among numerous ways Nagarro’s custom applications can help companies become more environmentally friendly.
Premier partners
One ingredient to Nagarro’s success is its various partnerships with associated companies. For example, with Microsoft the company is a Gold Certified partner and builds many of its software solutions on its platform. The company also implements and builds solutions around and/or integrated with the ERP system from SAP. Many of its midsize customers need to integrate or build on top of the SAP enterprise resource planning system.
Furthermore, the company works with several business intelligence tools like IBM Cognos, SAP Business Objects and Microsoft SSRS. “A lot of what we do for clients does require some form of decision support system based on business intelligence and data warehousing frameworks. We build such systems around these platforms,” says Sehgal.
Nagarro also works closely with the other companies in the industry as well as associations and academic institutions to develop business concepts, processes and algorithms that are then used to design software solutions for its clients.
Moving forward
On April 7, 2009, Vikas Sehgal posted what, on the surface, may have seemed to be a contradictory article on the company’s blog, stressing opportunities that have arisen for Nagarro during the recession. While many companies have suffered with layoffs and falling revenues, Nagarro has been quite successful in attracting new customers looking to increase efficiency.
“When the downturn hit, the obvious reaction from most companies was to put the brakes on tech spending,” says Sehgal. “But what we’ve noticed in the last quarter, quarter one, a lot of our clients have realized this is a really an opportunity to bring in more efficiencies and beat out the competition. These are the kind of projects we focus on, those business critical applications that our clients rely on for running their business efficiently.”
With this positive attitude, the outlook is bright at Nagarro. Sehgal is optimistic as to where the company will find itself at the end of the year. He says the company expects to continue growing at the rate they’ve been going and attracting more midsize enterprise customers looking for customized software solutions, as well as software startups looking to increase time to market with high-quality products. As for the coming year and onward, Sehgal will attempt to keep the vibrant culture at his company thriving.
“We’re trying to maintain an energetic company culture. That stimulating workplace makes the whole environment possible. For engineers who have been striving and training to solve the most complex tech problems in the world, having gone through intense academic programs to develop skills, it’s very demoralizing and boring for them to work through mundane stuff that’s not on par with the life they had intellectually in an academic environment. We’re not wasting that energy, we’re harnessing it and keeping that intellectual spark alive in a way that keeps people excited about solving these challenges and really be on the cutting edge and discovering new solutions,” says Sehgal.