“We specialize in the ‘change the business’ end of the spectrum of technology services”: Nagarro

A new approach to technology services

Nagarro specializes in the “change the business” end of the spectrum of technology services. In particular, Nagarro helps its clients move fast to protect themselves against digital disruptions, or helps them become disrupters themselves.

The company’s core offerings are application development and product engineering, with a clear focus on cutting-edge topics such as digital innovation, Big Data, IoT, wearables, cloud services and next-gen user experience.

Only a small fraction of Nagarro’s revenue comes from the “run the business” work (such as infrastructure management) or mega systems-integration projects which form the bread and butter of most global services firms. The working model is also consequently different. Nagarro’s organizational design and operating model is built around its tagline “Enterprise Agile”. It is non-hierarchical and built around small, autonomous, high impact teams of passionate, intelligent people. In contrast, most global services firms are process-heavy and focused on scaling, and the people are seen as relatively interchangeable cogs in the machine.

Nagarro believes that being agile is not just about using agile development methodologies in its projects; it is a culture of being flexible and easy to work with, of intense collaboration between teams that may be several thousand miles apart, and of being fiercely customer-centric. Nagarro’s intelligent and passionate experts help leading technology firms tackle complex, multi-disciplinary challenges in innovative, cost-effective, and game-changing ways. Nagarro’s customers rely on it to keep pace with new expectations, new possibilities, and new competitors.

The genesis

Founded in the late 1990s across US and India, Nagarro was acquired in 2011 by Allgeier SE, a German IT company based out of Munich, and continues to function as an independent division.

Nagarro grew out of operations consulting assignments with the European industry and the concomitant need to embed the recommendations in software as a “leave behind”. For example, one of the first projects was a factory simulator for a Belgian company made to prove the efficacy of a factory scheduling policy. Over time, Nagarro’s software business outgrew its operations consulting business and the company found itself working with world-leading clients in niche decision support projects. However, as the global services industry matured, many of Nagarro’s larger clients underwent vendor consolidation and Nagarro was too small at the time to make the grade.

Consequently, the company found itself working more and more with technology companies such as independent software vendors or ISVs. This was to some extent a blessing in disguise as Nagarro built up a strong technical competence that was later to hold the company in good stead when the large-client pendulum would swingback to smaller, tech-intensive, “change the business” projects.

Gradually, Nagarro’s technology service consulting business outgrew the original operations consulting, but the mathematical, algorithmic, machine learning and business optimization mindset still remains in the DNA. And this capability underpins several of the company’s projects.

ECM competency powered by SharePoint

Nagarro strongly believes that ECM is as much about creating smarter and more “aware” enterprise information infrastructure as it is about investing in the right set of tools and solutions. That said, Nagarro is a Microsoft Gold Partner in SharePoint application development, collaboration and content. Some of the company’s SharePoint solutions are showcased by Microsoft as “best practice” implementations. Nagarro has implemented a wide variety of SharePoint solutions for small teams and global corporations covering different versions of SharePoint (starting from SP 2003, MOSS 2007, SharePoint 2010, SharePoint 2013, to SharePoint 2016 and O365). Nagarro’s proprietary ready-to-deploy digital workplace accelerators help clients quickly meet their ECM needs and stay ahead of the competition.

Some SharePoint success stories

• Nagarro has developed a SharePoint-based corporate intranet for 40000+ employees of a Fortune 500 global manufacturer of premium skin care, makeup, hair care and fragrance products. The new, multi-lingual portal has a personalized home page and social features, supporting 10 languages and 30 different types of content.
• Nagarro has worked for multiple agencies of a major US city to create SharePoint-based collaboration portals for partners and employees. The portals have helped agencies build vibrant, collaborative workplaces and have brought in automated workflows for partner registration and content publishing.
• Nagarro developed a service and asset management portal for one of the largest technology services providers in Germany. The solution was initially intended for use by the software provider’s largest corporate clients. It has since become the standard platform through which the client’s enterprise customers configure their services and assets.
• Nagarro has built Office 365-based intranet portals for several pharma and biotech companies across the globe. The entire implementation in some cases was completed within 2 weeks, resulting in immediate ROI to the stakeholders.

The man behind the venture

Manas Fuloria, CEO, Nagarro: Manas holds a PhD with an operations research focus from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, and a Master’s in Manufacturing Systems Engineering from Stanford University. He has been a research associate with the Technology and Operations Management group at the Harvard Business School. He is also on the board of Nagarro’s parent company, Allgeier SE, which is listed on the Frankfurt stock exchange.