On the one side we help develop products that are life-saving, and, on the other, we help develop products that make life comfortable.” This is how Shashank Samant, CEO of GlobalLogic, describes his Silicon Valley-based company that helps develop medical devices—pacemakers and tools to check blood sugar levels—for medical technology firms such as Medtronic, as well as analyse data for internet giants like Google.
In industry jargon, GlobalLogic specialises in outsourced product development (OPD) and focuses on R&D services. That is why, says Samant, the company is different from typical IT services or BPO companies. “We don’t do anything and everything for everybody. We work at the core of technology,” he says. GlobalLogic caters to companies working in the areas of high technology, communications and media, medical devices and automotives.
Founded in 2000 by four friends—Rajul Garg, Manoj Agarwala, Sanjay Singh and Tarun Upadhyay—the company was then called IndusLogic. Although it had its corporate headquarters in Virginia, US, its biggest delivery base was in India. After seven acquisitions (after one such acquisition in 2006, the company changed its name to GlobalLogic), India remains the largest, with 4,600 of its 8,000 engineers. Its other major delivery bases are in Eastern Europe and South America. The US, however, is home to 70 percent of its clients.
The four founders had long moved out (selling stakes to private equity players New Enterprise Associates, Sequoia Capital, Westbridge Capital, Goldman Sachs, and New Atlantic Ventures) when Apax Partners, a UK-based private equity and venture capital firm, bought over the company in late 2013. “We were impressed with Samant’s team and the global delivery model it had developed,” says Shashank Singh, partner and head of Apax’s India office. Singh and his team tracked GlobalLogic for three years before acquiring it.
The man behind it
After stints at IBM, HP and NESS Technologies, Samant joined GlobalLogic as president in 2008 and became CEO in 2012, taking over from Peter Harrison who became vice chairman.
In the six years since he joined, the company’s revenues grew from $50 million to $250 million (FY2014). GlobalLogic, Samant adds, has been profitable for seven years and has an Ebidta (earnings before interest, depreciation, tax and amortisation) margin of 20 percent.
With technology at its core, the company realises the significance of understanding engineering to appreciate the business. Therefore, it is a requirement that each of its top executives, even those heading marketing functions, is an engineer. It is for the same reason that human resource functions are localised.
Where the organisation’s structure is concerned, Samant introduced the concept of a unified product delivery lab. “Earlier, the labs were structured according to the industry they were catering to and were operating in silos,” says A Nandini, vice president and head of the Noida delivery unit. Integrating the labs—they are spread across regions but structured under a single unit and headed by a person in Virginia—has helped GlobalLogic cross-leverage talent and stay updated with the latest in technology.
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(This story appears in the 25 July, 2014 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)
At the end of the day this company glorified body shop....with Blue collar IT (Low end) work.
on Jul 18, 2014