Hexaware - Technology
Hexaware is a global technology and business process services company. With 54 offices in 19 countries, we empower enterprises worldwide to realize digital transformation at scale and speed by partnering with them to build, transform, run, and optimize their technology and business processes.
Hexaware is a purpose-driven organization, and our purpose is to create smiles through great people and technology. I firmly believe that if we continue to create smiles, we will realize our vision of being the most loved digital transformation partner in the world. As CEO, I am, of course, responsible for developing and implementing strategies to drive profitability, improve operations, gain traction in the market, etc. – but the part of my job that I enjoy the most and that I believe is foundational to who I am as a leader is my role as chief smile-maker. Creating smiles as a way of life is core to who I am and is the cornerstone that Hexaware’s culture has been built upon. Each one of our 30,000 ‘Hexawarians’ spread across our delivery centers in India, Singapore, Philippines, England, Netherlands, Latvia, Poland, Germany, Belgium, North America, Mexico, Australia, Brazil & Argentina work towards creating smiles every day.
You are a veteran of the IT industry with more than 25 years’ worth of experience. How did your prior roles and experiences prepare you to start leading Hexaware in 2014?
I joined HCL as a trainee shortly after college and rose to become the President of two different businesses which accounted for almost half of HCL Tech’s business. I joined Hexaware as the CEO after nearly 20 years at HCL to build a great organization. Building a great organization is a journey that is never complete and one that takes a very long time. It has been more than eight years in this journey, and I fully expect to retire from Hexaware. We have more than tripled in size during this period. During my time working in the IT industry, I’ve gained extensive knowledge in technology and operations that I have leveraged to drive growth. However, the running thread through all these experiences, the true driver of growth, was that I had a great team supporting me just as I supported them.
Can you tell us more about Hexaware’s strategy and how it serves to boost its clients’ growth?
Our strategy is focused on empowering enterprises to realize their digital value. We accomplish this through four key services: Build, Transform, Run, and Optimize. Through our Build service, we design, build, and market human-centric digital products, platforms, and applications that create brand gravity for our customers. Through our Transform service, we help our customers to achieve digital transformation at speed and scale. Our Run service enables our customers to enhance efficiency and lower costs across their IT landscape. And last but not least, our Optimize service drives business outcomes for our customers through process optimization. To achieve our vision of being the most loved digital transformation partner in the world, we must serve as a true partner in every aspect across the full spectrum of digital transformation.
In simple terms, we want to boost our customers’ growth through significant IT cost savings, improved operational efficiency, increased productivity, reduced manual efforts, and unmatched user and customer experiences. Therefore, we have invested heavily in building platforms to accelerate our customers’ digital journey. Our platforms – like Tensai®, which enables unified, automation-driven IT Ops, and our US-patented suite Amaze®, which accelerates the cloud journey – are designed to help our customers embark on a seamless digital transformation journey that enables competitive agility and exponential growth.
Is there anything that you can share with us about Hexaware’s projects for 2023?
We have doubled down on platform engineering. With the global tech talent shortage, many of our customers are short-staffed or have software developers that understand the technology but aren’t necessarily experts in the industry domain of their employer. To solve these issues, many of our customers will look to empower their developers via a curated self-service set of tools, capabilities, and processes that together will offer a frictionless experience and accelerate their teams’ delivery of value. We have built our own platform to support this, which we will launch very soon.
Another critical investment area for us in 2023 continues to be building industry-specific platforms and technology solutions. We know that understanding technology isn’t enough – we must also deeply understand the industries in which our clients operate so that we can translate their business needs into opportunities for growth through digital transformation. Hexaware has built deep industry expertise over the years by focusing on serving specific industries and attracting and retaining people who know those industries inside and out. We will continue to leverage that expertise to build platforms and accelerators that serve specific needs. In the healthcare space alone, two examples immediately come to mind. The first is CarrotCube, our patient engagement platform that provides insight-driven care management for healthcare providers. The second example is an interactive, visual digital support tool we developed in our Netherlands development center for Europe’s largest comprehensive childhood cancer center, the Princess Maxima Center, to guide and support the families of pediatric cancer patients throughout the course of their treatment.
By 2026, we expect enterprises that have adopted AI engineering practices to outperform their peers in the number of AI models and the time it takes to operationalize them by at least 25%. This is why we continue to invest in our unified AIOps platform, Tensai®. Tensai® offers a suite of products that provide 360-degree views at an organizational level and perform centralized AI engineering.
We are also placing the spotlight on the metaverse as we firmly believe this is an area with a plethora of opportunities to build cutting-edge industry solutions. Our research tells us that by 2027, over 40% of organizations worldwide will be using a combination of Web3, spatial computing, and digital twins in metaverse-based projects aimed at increasing revenue. We are very proud to be part of the UNFUR digital fur fashion collection (NFTs) at the MET AMS 4-day festival, where the metaverse and reality come to meet. Every year, one hundred million animals are bred and killed to supply the fashion industry. The complete earnings of the collection auction are used to fight the fur industry worldwide.
How do you measure your success?
I believe we are successful when we achieve our goals in a way that is driven by our purpose and mirrors our values. Hexaware’s purpose of creating smiles is my purpose as well. Making a positive impact in the lives of our employees, customers, and the communities in which we operate is the ultimate success. We can measure this success through accolades we have received, such as the ISG Star of Excellence™ award. We won the 2022 ISG Star of Excellence Awards™ for the Global Region and Universal Industry categories by consistently demonstrating the highest standards of customer service excellence, as voted by our enterprise customers globally. In Europe, we ranked first in the relationship and commercial dimensions for account management quality, price level, and contractual flexibility and third in overall customer satisfaction in Whitelane Research’s 2022 Europe IT Sourcing Study. In the same study, we ranked second for sustainability, which I am particularly proud of. Another sustainability-related accolade we received was from Neo Group, a leading advisory firm, which ranked Hexaware high in both Operational-Performative Alignment and Cultural-Attitudinal Alignment in their 2022 ESG Adoption Survey Report. These accolades, like others we have received, prove that our values are more than just words on paper for us – we truly live them out loud every day in the work we do.
What does this award mean to you?
I’d be extremely honored to receive this award, as it is a reminder that we are making a real impact out there and that our efforts are being recognized in the industry. It comes with great responsibility and indicates that we are doing the right things the right way. I consider this recognition as a stepping stone to becoming a better organization, and I will continue striving for excellence in everything we do.