She was then appointed as the global leader of Cap Gemini Ernst & Young’s energy and utilities sector unit. In an exclusive interview to Dataquest, she shares her views on the utility sector and speaks out on the recent deregulation in this space...

l On your focus and objective...
We have come to India to leverage the capabilities of center in Mumbai and also help in the content we have out of the other sectors and our experiences in Europe and the US. Also, we will leverage more local occupants. We can also be helpful due to the content we have here.

l On your strategy for this market...
We believe in a combination of outsourcing and rendering outshored services. This is because the client wants the front office close to them.

l What is the typical combination you look at in terms of revenue spread?
Range varies depending on various aspects such as consulting, integration etc. It can be 30:70, 40:60 or 50:50. There is no fixed combination that we follow.

l What are the benchmark consulting rates for the projects?
It depends on the client, projects and the company. We don’t have average rate because we are in the high value chain and have high value experts to less specific consultants, IT integration and outsourcing.

l Which is the most lucrative part of the business I terms of the revenue generator?
The growth is taking place in the utilities sector in Europe. The deregulation in Europe that has been accelerated by the European commission decisions is triggered a need for IT systems. So I would say that in this area we are growing and capturing more offshore business.  Simply put the utilities sector in Europe is very big.

l What will be the business fallout of the utilities deregulation?
The main thing is that we sell is because of deregulation. A lot of what we do is customer management systems or billing systems. Because of the deregulation, we have to redo the billing system. These are very big systems. In old companies billing was done according to the meter system. So now we have to rethink the billing system, no longer on the practical point of view but from the customer point of view. Indian software companies have a lot to do in the utility sector especially in the billing segment.

l If you are doing the customer IT management part. What part of it is outsourced? Is it the application?
We use SAP, CRM specific packaging applications. We mainly use the functional analysis and then the deregulation and then the testing. Usually the company assigns this to someone. Our mission is that once the project is done, do the application management. Then only companies consider the total IT cost. We tell companies that they need to change to a new system and find a way to safe guard your existing system for which we have the application management infrastructure options.

Rahul Gupta
(CNS)