Aziz Virani, executive vice president at Avanade, has only been with the technology consultancy since August, but he was with Accenture, one of the founders of Avanade, for nearly a quarter of a century, when it was Arthur Andersen. "I had always known about Avanade, because Avanade was created before my very eyes," he says, adding he made the switch because he wanted the experience of a smaller, growth-focused company "where I could have a much bigger impact." And Avanade is having an impact—not only is it on the forefront of new technology trends, but cost-cutting ones as well. Virani spoke with Consulting about these oftentimes complementary efforts.
Consulting: In this environment, clients are obviously looking to save money. What is Avanade doing to help clients save money on IT?
Virani: Obviously there are major shifts happening in many, many industries. Retail clients are going through massive pain as well with consumer spending being pulled back. So any industry you pick is really going through significant evaluation of their business models and their profitability. And what that's really doing is giving rise to looking at what are we doing with technology and our technology spend. You'd be surprised how many clients I talk to who still don't really have a clear understanding of what are all the licenses [they own]? And [are we] really making use of all the things that we've paid for? We are trying to establish a theme around helping clients think about: What do you already have? Where are you already investing? How can you optimize more with what you already have? And we are talking about various technology solutions that go to that point.
Consulting: What is the average cost savings you're seeing?
Virani: It's a bit of a case-by-case basis. For example, if you have a client who has not really experimented or has not really scaled the use of off-shore resources, it is not atypical on an application by application basis for them to see savings of 20 to 30 percent.
Consulting: Do you go to market with the promise of saving that kind of money?
Virani: I often start with industry benchmarks or I often say, "Hey we work with a lot of other companies in your industry, maybe even some competitors, and obviously without giving any specific competitor data, we can talk about industry benchmarks." You can start with those kinds of metrics to set the baseline.
Consulting: Who are your clients?
Virani: We are owned primarily by Accenture and Microsoft. A lot of the work that Avanade does with Accenture tends to be in the Fortune 500 companies because that's basically Accenture's client base. And I think a lot of that is true for Microsoft's client base as well. Then there are clients that Avanade does work for directly where Accenture oftentimes is not involved. And those are what I would call midmarket clients—$1 billion to $5 billion market cap. We end up covering quite a breadth of client base.
Consulting: Will this emphasis on cost reduction diminish when the economy turns around?
Virani: You know, we've had these downturns before, haven't we? But this one does feel a little different. If, nothing else, because of the speed with which it has happened. Yeah, I think that may happen in some industries, but I think in general a lot of these efficiency plays tend to be relatively permanent. For example if you go down the virtualization space or go down the journey of doing more offshore, often those are not things that are easily reversible. A new set of efficiency becomes the new standard. The next time something happens, the bar is even higher.
Consulting: What are some of the trends you're seeing right now?
Virani: There are certainly what we would call "disruptive technology trends" emerging that really stand to change the organization quite significantly. One of the ones in the industry, which is becoming quite a hot topic these days, is around cloud computing, or some people use the term "software as a service." If you look at just that one particular trend and if you look at what all the major players in the industry are doing, whether it's Mircrosoft or IBM or SAP or even Amazon or Google, all the major players in the industry are taking a view and taking a position in the cloud computing/software-as-a-service space. And that's one trend that has the potential to change the enterprise and how computing is done quite dramatically.
Things that most enterprises do on a daily basis, such as e-mail, such as collaboration, are beginning to move into the cloud. The future is unknown, but people are already talking about large companies, Fortune 100 companies, [having a] private cloud, where they have their own infrastructure and their own security for their own mission-critical custom applications. There [could] be for example industry clouds where industry services are commonly available for companies in a common industry.
Consulting: What kinds of services?
Virani: If you think about, say, the airline industry, every airline company has a reservation system. But it's not a competitive advantage. The fact that you can make a reservation doesn't give an airline company a competitive advantage. So in the future I can imagine various services of that nature being commonly available to players in that industry as a service while they focus on creating their differentiator, perhaps in customer service, perhaps in class of service, perhaps in pricing. But clearly, making a reservation is not an advantage.
It's relatively early. Your household name companies are now evaluating or already doing some cloud computing at the utility level. Your true trailblazers, your true early adopters are maybe evaluating platforms for their custom applications. I think that comes next in the hierarchy. The trailblazers are evaluating platforms, how would it work, what would be the security aspects, how would I manage it, who would provide service levels if I move it into the cloud. It's one thing if your e-mail doesn't work and you call someone, it's another thing if you can't send your customers a bill. It's a bit of an evolution probably over I would say the next two to four years in terms of how the whole space matures.
Consulting: What is Avanade's role in that evolution?
Virani: Where we are getting involved is helping customers think about what should be your cloud strategy, for example? What should be your application profile that you should think about? What is your roadmap for going into the cloud, if you will? How would you manage this? What skills would you need? What methodologies might you need? What tools might you need to move applications into the cloud? What is the economic business case?
Consulting: That sounds more like strategy work than implementation.
Virani: You're right. I think it's something we're starting to do more of now. It has a touch of what you would call strategy work. But it is very different in the sense that it is very technology driven. Accenture has been doing that work for decades. So this would be one area where I think Avanade and Accenture would most likely develop joint go-to-market offerings, because we have so much to leverage.
© Arc, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to TMSalesOperations@arc-network.com. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.