See why large IT companies like Wipro, TCS, Accenture are working with start-ups

BANGALORE: AbsolutData, founded by Anil Kaul, Sudeshna Datta and Suhale Kapoor, not only provides analytics services to big clients independently but also works with some of the largest IT services companies to add value to their own offerings.
"Analytics adds incremental revenues of $30 to $100 an hour to the IT firms' solutions," says Kapoor.
Large IT companies are increasingly partnering with smaller firms offering specialised services to create a differentiated proposition for their clients. Many of these startups are in emerging areas like analytics, cloud, big data and mobility. With application maintenance and development getting commoditised, IT firms are compelled to use these specialized offerings to cross-sell and up-sell services. Though some of them are trying to build in-house capabilities in these areas, few still have the kind of expertise that focussed start-ups have.
"IT companies find it hard to replicate what specialised firms bring to the table. That's because specialised players have a targeted positioning, talent pool and greater speed of execution," says Roy K Cherian, CEO of Bangalore-based analytics firm Marketelligent.
Marketelligent has partnered with a large IT company for the latter's CPG (consumer packaged goods) practice. "They (IT company) haven't done enough work on trade promotions. We are building a trade promotion platform that they will leverage on," says Anunay Gupta, co-founder of Marketelligent.
OrangeScape, the Chennai-based platform-as-a-service provider founded by Suresh Sambandam, works with Wipro, TCS, Accenture and Mahindra Satyam. Sambandam says large IT companies have no option but to work with companies like his because their traditional IT implementation and system integration contracts are drying up thanks to cloud based solutions. "The cloud is simple and costs much less. And in cloud, everything is already integrated, so the system integration work reduces to a tenth of what it is in traditional implementations. OrangeScape helps big IT companies get a foot in the door of mega IT projects," he says.
Balaji Sreenivasan's Bangalore-based Aurigo, a project management solutions specialist, has been working with Avanade, an Accenture subsidiary that offers services specialised to the Microsoft software platform. They have worked together on government projects in Canada and for large energy and electric transmission US companies.
Manav Garg's Bangalore-based Eka Software, which provides commodity trading and risk management software, has partnered with large Indian IT services companies to bid for big deals in the agri and energy utilities spaces.
Aurigo's Sreenivasan says the systems integrator (large IT services companies) brings in the professional services required to deliver the configurations, integration, training, change enablement and support, and the ISV (independent software vendors like Aurigo or Eka) provides the software and training support.
Wipro's chief technology officer Anurag Srivastava agrees it's imperative for IT companies to scale into new areas quickly but the speed of innovation required cannot be developed organically. "So we have institutionalised what is called the external innovation programme where Wipro strengthens partnerships with smaller specialised firms. We are also working with VC firms in the Bay Area, Boston, the Nordic region and India to 'onboard' technology start-ups into the CTO office to build specific process solutions and technology capabilities into our offerings," he says.