Interview Questions

Full Interview with Phaneesh Murthy

Phaneesh Murthy:

At iGATE, we have formulated our business strategy based on market conditions, our competition, and finally, our own aspirations. While we are doing this exercise, advances in technology are always kept in mind, so that we can come up with strategies that are current with the times.

Internal IT is always involved in the process of validating strategy feasibility and providing inputs on faster, cheaper and better way of doing things.

 

Phaneesh Murthy:

IT infrastructure at iGATe runs on L2 through L7 switching networks in order to provide reliability and performance. The infrastructure is secured using seven layers of defense according to the 'Defense in Depth Model'. Our IT infrastructure is configured with one of the best available disaster recovery solutions in order to provide 100 percent uptime for mission-critical projects.

Our network is largely IP-based on which we run data, voice and video. The ERP system sits on top of this for transaction processing

 

Phaneesh Murthy:

At iGATE, we have been outsourcing around 10 percent to 15 percent of our total information systems and IT work. Our belief is that as long as the processes are governed by us and clear expectations and objectives are set out by us, we are comfortable in outsourcing the work to somebody else, provided they can do it more efficiently than us.

Phaneesh Murthy:

We do not have a CIO designate. We have split the IT function into two: one, under the head of application and the other, under the head of IT infrastructure. Both report to the chief financial officer, and jointly play the role of a conventional CIO.

One of the reasons behind this appraoch is that IT plays a critical role in our offerings to the marketplace.

 

Phaneesh Murthy:

We have a dedicated team to provide 24x7 support to all our applications that have customer touch-points. We have also provided dashboard and portal views for our customers.

Phaneesh Murthy:

At iGATE, we have ensured that the head of IT infrastructure is integral in putting together our Infrastructure Management Service offering, our SLAs involved with end customers in managing their expectations, and fully involved in putting a back-end infrastructure to service our customers most efficiently.

We provide the internal IT team with various opportunities for self-development, which includes courses on leadership, communication and project management, among others.

 

Phaneesh Murthy:

It is important for everybody in the company to be customer savvy, so that they understand the needs of the customer. We encourage all people in our HR, finance, IT and IS functions to be customer-facing.

Phaneesh Murthy:

An important component of our technology infrastructure is that we have a fairly flexible and scalable architecture to which we add telecom bandwidth to connect to various offices and customers. As we add on complex security-conscious clients in verticals like financial services, we have come up with a way to firewall these customers' networks more effectively, while giving us complete access to what we need to carry out our work.

Phaneesh Murthy:

Based on the trend over the past years, we have been moving from expensive ISDN networks to the cheaper and more efficient IP networks. We have enhanced security to have multiple bootable systems to leverage multi-shift operations. We have used software and tools tailored to different geographies to ensure optimal support to customers as well as our people in the field.

While the broad directions and strategy are set by the executive committee, the head of IT procures most components, subject to a broad governance model.

 

Phaneesh Murthy:

We believe in having the most responsive IT organization to meet the needs of both our internal and external customers. We believe that at the broadest level, the most successful IT organization is one which is invisible and proactively ensures that there are no failure points, rather than having facilities to take service calls. On the applications side, we have a strategy on the way our business is evolving, so that we get the required information and insight needed to run our business with more control.

Phaneesh Murthy:

We have always followed a strategy of having complete redundancy to ensure disaster recovery and business continuity. This is particularly imperative for us because more than 70 percent of our work is done out of India for customers overseas and we cannot afford to have any downtime for this large pool of productive intellectual capital.  The good news for us is that as more vendors start providing sophisticated systems with redundancy built in, it becomes easy for us to leverage on these systems; and it also becomes cheaper for us.

Phaneesh Murthy:

For us, there are two primary metrics here: availability and throughput. Our IT and IS infrastructure are well geared to optimize this.