As a senior vice president with Cardinal Health in the mid-1990s, Atul Vashistha came up with a distinctly consultant-esque realization.
“The shortage of technology talent in the U.S. was causing my portfolio of businesses at Cardinal to expand internationally, and I saw firsthand that the professional services sector in India was growing rapidly,” he recalls. “I realized that there was a tremendous opportunity to help companies buy and manage offshore services. But clients were not looking for technology; they were looking for the right outcome, and the way they would reach that desired outcome was through expertise and some hand-holding.”

In 1999, Vashistha launched neoIT, which offers a blend of strategic advisory services and “hands-on” implementation support to help clients capitalize on services globalization.

As a client executive, Vashistha was impressed by the intellects of the consultants he hired and worked with. “They had expertise and processes, but I found that they lacked experience, and this made the relationships difficult at times,” he says.

Determined to avoid that “theory vs. practice” pitfall as CEO of his own consulting firm, Vashistha sought consultants who had expertise (“real-time knowledge” of the global sourcing world, he em-phasizes, “not conclusions from marketing surveys”), could follow neoIT’s processes, and possessed real-world global outsourcing experience. He hired consultants who had worked with and for global services providers around the world.

“I’ve learned that if you hire extremely intelligent people who absolutely love outcomes, clients tend to be very happy,” he adds. Vashistha’s insights have been cited on CNN, ABC News, and CNBC, and in the pages of Fortune, Forbes, BusinessWeek, and The Economist. He squared off against Lou Dobbs — live, no less — on Dobbs’s “Exporting America” segment on CNN. Earlier this year, McGraw-Hill published The Offshore Nation: Strategies for Success in Global Outsourcing and Offshoring, which Vashistha co-authored with Avinash Vashistha, neoIT’s managing partner.