Spotlight

R Systems: global aspirations, Indian roots

Acknowledged by Nasscom as one of the most ‘exciting emerging companies to work for’, R Systems has evolved from a small consulting company to a successful outsourced product development organization. Manjari Juneja traces its ambitious growth journey

When Satinder Singh Rekhi was fired from his job, he made up his mind to start his own company. His firm determination led to the establishment of R Systems International Limited (R Systems) in 1993. R Systems has grown from a 35-employee consulting company to employing more than 2300 professionals. It has carved a niche for itself as an IT software product development organization and also offers BPO services. The company has eight centers of software excellence (CoEs) with two located in the US, three in India, one in Singapore and two in Europe. The worldwide headquarters, based in Noida, has close to 1250 employees.

An IIT Khargapur graduate with an MBA from California State University, Rekhi had held senior management positions with HCL Technologies, Synergex and Disc Computers, US. He launched this company with literally no money in his pocket and had no resources at his command. Today, R Systems is a well established provider of outsourced product development and customer support services. It also has a few own products in the consumer finance and supply chain management space.

Satinder Singh Rekhi stated, “We help companies accelerate their speed to market products and services with a high degree of time and cost predictability by using our proprietary pSuite framework. Clients can choose services specific to their needs from our Integrated Product Life Cycle management Services (iPLM) suite of services. We help companies build scalable, configurable and secure products and applications. We help our clients support their customers worldwide for products and services using our global delivery model in 18 languages.”

Initial struggle During the initial days, R Systems was majorly into consulting and provided onsite services. Consequent to the changed business condition after 1999, the company progressively shifted its business towards outsourced and offshore product development and business process outsourcing services. Today, they are a well-recognized player in the product development services arena. An estimate of their successful move to offshore-centric services is evidenced from the fact that RSI’s onsite revenues in 1999 were just about 38% as against almost 100% revenues coming from onsite work in the year 2008. This clearly indicates success of their strategy in moving the bias of their business from an onsite-centric to offshore-centric model.

Rekhi added, “We faced challenges in transforming our business model from onsite to offshore and establishing ourselves as a renowned player in outsourced and off-shore product development services and business process outsourcing service segment. It is a matter of pride that RSI today is recognized as one of very few companies who have successfully transformed their business model from onsite-centric to offshore-centric.”

Client strategy

R Systems’ rapidly growing customer list includes many of the Fortune 1000 companies, government and mid-sized organizations across a wide range of industry verticals, including the BFSI, healthcare, manufacturing and logistic industries. R Systems maintains eight development and service centers and using its global delivery model the company serves its customers in the US, Europe, South America, the Far East, the Middle East and Africa.

For an IT company, its clients and employees are the two most precious assets. R Systems’ business model and strategy involves serving the clients in a manner that they get measurable tangible benefits. When a client sees value in the services that R Systems provides, two things happen:

• Customer relationship is automatically nurtured into a long-term relationship, and
• It helps in winning new clients. At present they have more than 125 clients, including many Global 1000 companies

“Employees are our other most precious asset and we value their role and commitment in building R Systems. In the IT and ITeS industry, attracting, developing, deploying and retaining talent is critical and R Systems has defined and implemented a People Management Initiative, which is in line with industry best practices.  It effectively manages the employee life cycle such that individuals are committed, have pride and show pro-activeness on the job. We were assessed at PCMM- Level 5 in July 2009,” informed Rekhi.

Key solutions

• Digital media solutions: R Systems has designed and implemented a variety of digital media solutions catering to delivery of video, music and other digital content over IP and mobile networks. Quad play solutions are now a reality. R Systems partners with leading media and technology organizations to provide strategies and solutions for Digital Media Monetization.
• Independent software vendors: Once the ISV has established a reasonable customer base and has sufficient cash flows to support structured product development, they can then evaluate the option of using a strategic partner such as R Systems who can set up a dedicated offshore development center (ODC). R Systems provides the added benefit of being a one stop shop for the complete needs of ISVs.
• Hospitality: R Systems works with leaders in the hotel industry to provide solutions that help optimize revenue per available room (RevPAR). By leveraging key drivers such as personnel management, customer service and brand enhancement programs, R Systems facilitates the implementation of smart, technology driven services that enable personalized services to be delivered to key stakeholders—be it hotel employees or guests.
• Banking and financial services: R Systems’ banking and financial services business unit, Indus Software, provides a product suite targeted at the retail lending market. This includes modules for loan origination/mortgages/leasing, loan servicing and debt collections. With customers spread across the world, key users of these solutions are large financial services organizations such as GE Consumer Finance, ABN AMRO bank and Standard Chartered Bank as well as large banking institutions in over 25 countries.
• Healthcare: R Systems provides a wide variety of services to organizations in the healthcare industry. This includes companies that develop, manufacture and market health related products or health care services such as hospitals, mid sized provider organizations, HMO’s, plan providers, payers, medical billing companies, medical equipment and medical device manufacturers.
• Government: R Systems’ state and local government practice has delivered numerous technology solutions to help government leaders transform their organizations from a government agency to an e-government organization.

Many challenges

Being one of the leading players in offshore software product development and business process outsourcing segment, R Systems, like others, is also facing challenges such as threats from competitors, demand for global talent, adverse changes in foreign currency rates and economic slowdown.

However, with its rich experience in providing end-to-end solutions and services, unique and proprietary iPLM and pSuite framework with best practices, tools and methodologies for flawless execution, continued investment in processes, talent, methodologies, the organization claims to be well positioned to take these challenges and emerge as stronger a successful global corporation. The other significant strengths are strong customer franchise consisting of large and mid-sized corporations, strong financial position, apart from proven global delivery model and deep domain knowledge in lending business solutions and supply chain management,

Future plans

Rekhi’s vision is to build a growth-oriented, process-driven and people-centric organization to provide innovative IT solutions and end-to-end software product support to clients, globally.

Due to the global slowdown, technology related spending in 2009 has been impacted significantly and a rebound is expected in the near future. “We have been continuously looking inwards and focusing on process benchmarking, enhanced utilization of infrastructure and talent, increasing productivity and greater customer engagement. Further, we are sanguine that worldwide adoption of outsourcing will rise significantly in the coming years as overseas companies are continuously looking for cost-cutting measures, which will help us in winning new clients,” concludes Rekhi.

manjari.juneja@expressindia.com