Exclusives

In March, IT and business consulting and systems implementation firm Virtusa Corporation acquired a majority stake in Polaris Consulting & Services, creating VirtusaPolaris, a new market-facing brand comprising 18,000-plus-employee, representing a $1 billion-a-year company that handles IT services and solutions for Global 2000cClients, with presence across most every major industry, including telecom, media and entertainment and information services.

Being a global IT services and consulting company — with centers in more than a dozen countries — that possesses a large offshore capability is one of VirtusaPolaris’ main attractions for prospective clients: the company offers both front-end consulting and strategy expertise as well as back-end execution capabilities, according to Kurt Smith, SVP for the company’s Communications, Media, Information and Entertainment division.

Smith spoke with the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) about the company’s growth, how it’s helping its clients reimagine business in the digital era.

MESA: What does VirtusaPolaris offer that’s unique in the media and entertainment space?

 Smith: We think three things are critically important to our success: the first is developing a deep understanding of the Industry business issues that the companies we work with face. As a concrete example, the people on my team each have 25 years of experience or more, working with large media and entertainment companies.

Second, it is vitally important to be laser-focused on our customer’s success. One of the traps I see both offshore and large consulting firms falling into is focusing on the project success rather than the customer success. Even though we’re a $1 billion company, we are nimble enough to   develop and deliver innovative solutions that spell success for our client’s businesses. We are building credentials and capabilities that will further benefit both our existing and new clients.

And third, being able to help organizations effectively navigate digital transformation. We are proud of the fact that we have both the business knowledge and the technical skills to help our clients think through and execute digital on their transformation strategy.

 MESA: How does VirtusaPolaris’ outsourcing and consulting work apply to helping companies transition to today’s digital reality?

 Smith: Within digital transformation, we see five areas where our consulting expertise and outsourcing capabilities can really make a difference for clients.

The first is all about the consumer experience and customer intimacy. For example, we help clients with omni-channel campaign management, social media, and personalization – which enables the customer an understanding the customer better and as a result being able to more effectively target advertising campaigns to those customers. And we already see that instead of having three potential customer segments and two campaigns that target each segment, there’s a need to target, for example, ‘Men over the age of 50 that live in western Essex County that like hockey.’ That happens to be me. By being able to offer more granular campaign targeting, we see our clients increase all the key measures: client intimacy, the cost per thousand impressions (CPM), brand perception, reduced churn, and customer satisfaction

The second area of focus is around data, assets and data visualization. We can help an organization to leverage ETL (extract, transform and load) tools to pull together massive amount of information and transform it into a workable format that allows senior executives to see ‘the forest through the trees’ and make more accurately informed strategic business decisions. This functional practice area extends to the management of digital assets as finished goods. In other words, there’s data, and there are also digital assets. We help clients with both.

Our third area of proven proficiency within digital transformation is around digital execution, whether it is helping a client extend its’ offering across mobile devices or to integrate robotics and cognitive solutions into existing processes or capitalize on intelligent wearables. In this area we help client companies to carefully consider and better deliver personalized experiences to their customers.

The fourth area that we have deep skills in is around helping customers with the cloud. We are very experienced in helping companies with cloud strategy, roadmap, and execution of cloud migration projects. For example, we are currently working with a major media company that has more than a thousand applications and is focused on getting 50% or 500 of those on cloud services.

The final area within digital transformation bucket is we have robust domain knowledge and technical competence around business systems, or what we call ‘Transact’. This includes billing and revenue management systems and connecting to SAP, Oracle or back-office systems. This may also involve modernizing financial processes to account for all the changes that came about as a result of an organization’s digital transformation.

MESA: What does VirtusaPolaris’ application support services entail?

 Smith: We have the ability to monitor, manage and maintain business applications once they are implemented. So, VirtusaPolaris is able to not only to implement the selected system, but also support. VirtusaPolaris Platforming strategy is apt for Global 2000 organizations, especially those that have large enterprise IT estates often replicating core business processes across redundant application stovepipes. We can also provide the outsource/manpower for billing and revenue reconciliation, or collections in order to minimize revenue leakage.

MESA: VirtusaPolaris has verticals across more than a dozen industries. Why focus on these specific areas?

Smith: We focus on industries where meaningful transformation is happening, such as banking and financial services, insurance, healthcare, media and entertainment, telecommunications, and information services. All of these verticals are undergoing a significant sea change, whether it is going from a business-to-business (B2B) model to a business-to-consumer (B2C) model or a market demanding a ‘millennial experience’ even for commercial or business applications to look and behave much more like consumer applications.

Not surprisingly, we see companies struggling with trying to keep up with new market entrants and with maintaining their brand promise; not only to consumers but also to their employees and with the systems they have to work with.

MESA: How has Virtusa (and now VirtusaPolaris) evolved over the years?

 Smith: We have been in business for 20 years now and boast a rich heritage in engineering and software development. Based on the work we have completed for clients in the last four to five years, we have honed our expertise specifically in digital transformation.

Earlier in the company’s history, we developed software platforming methodology that addressed the market needs for outsourced product development (OPD). This, coupled with our global delivery model and our industry expertise makes it possible for us to provide high-value IT services that enable clients to enhance business performance, accelerate time-to-market, increase productivity, reduce cost of ownership and improve customer service. Today, our digital transformation capabilities layer on and add to those IT services.

We offer a broad set of capabilities and we are on equal footing with onshore and well as leading offshore players. We are that boutique firm that give our customers the best of the ‘big consulting firms’ and the ‘big off shore firms”. We increasingly see shifting interest towards mid-size market players, such as VirtusaPolaris, that provide optimal cost and delivery options combined with flexibility, agility and business alignment. So, that’s what VirtusaPolaris is really all about.

MESA: What’s next for the company, and what are some of the highlights for VirtusaPolaris to date?

Smith: Our vision is to apply domain and technology innovation to accelerate business outcomes for clients. We do this through consulting, digital services, platforming and optimization services. We work with many recognized market leaders in media and entertainment and Information services. Examples of recent work includes:

• We assessed the digital maturity of a large newspaper holding company and built a foundation platform that accelerated time to market for digital products as well as increased revenue for this Canadian company.
• We delivered the most visited food website in the world, which is powered by interactive videos and personalized content. This increased revenue per user by over 240% for the company.
• We migrated more than 1,000 applications to AWS cloud, creating a zero footprint data center for a leading American multinational mass media corporation.