Focusing on specialists and ruthlessly saying no to anything outside the company's focus areas helped this ex-Infosys executive raise his team's aspirations to play in the big league
Sudhir Singh, CEO and executive director at Coforge Image: Madhu Kapparath
If you had an interest in the underpinnings of Lloyd’s of London, one of the things you’d discover would be that between a quarter and a third of the volumes on this globally known insurance and reinsurance market runs on AdvantageGo, a tech platform built by a relatively small IT company with most of its people in Noida.
One of the IT company’s original founders once described it as “the most profitable distraction” they had, as reported by the Hindu Businessline in May 2022. Their first love was education, and they’ve gone back to it, but that’s a story for another day.
The founders sold the tech services part of the 30-year-old company, then called NIIT Technologies, to Barings Private Equity in 2019. A professional CEO, who’d come in about a year earlier, forged Coforge out of it—the name change happened around August 2020—and took it from about $440 million for the year ended March 31, 2018, to about a $1 billion for the current fiscal year, based on the company’s latest estimates.
This is the story of how that CEO, Sudhir Singh, achieved that milestone, and what he and his 22,500-strong team want to do next.
Singh loves to talk about how Coforge is “atypical” for a company its size. This comes from the playbook that he and his chosen 14 deputies have put together. “We are engineers and technologists who spend an inordinate amount of time understanding the very limited functional spaces that we focus on,” he says.