An Interview with Girish Gaitonde, Xoriant Corporation Founder and CEO: ‘We Leverage Our Expertise in Emerging Technologies to Deliver Innovative Solutions that Enables Our Clients To Help Their Clients Achieve Accelerated Digital Transformation’

“With a firm belief in the value of prototyping, we work alongside our clients to ideate and build next-generation solutions.”

When businesses and the way they operate shift from their traditional mode of operation and management to the modern and technology-oriented ways of operation, these transitions are referred as Digital Transformation or disruption.

Since change is the only thing constant, digital transformation has become imperative for all businesses; small, medium and large. There is a need for organizations to address the change in business scenarios, dynamic business demands and innovate ways to quickly cater to these changing needs.

In view of the above-mentioned scenario, we’re thrilled to present Xoriant Corporation.

Xoriant provides product development, engineering, and consulting services for technology startups and mid-size to large corporations. It offers product engineering services, including product ideation, product architecture, testing Q&A, migration and porting, technical support, sustaining engineering, and professional services; such as business applications, application lifecycle management, custom applications development, data warehousing and business intelligence, package implementation, application integration, application testing, and banking and financial services.

The company also provides enterprise services, including business intelligence, data migration, performance testing and tuning, application management, and consulting services.

Xoriant was founded in 1990 and is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. It has delivery centers in New Jersey, the United Kingdom, and India.

Girish Gaitonde, Xoriant Corporation Founder/CEO, spoke exclusively to The Silicon Review. Below is an excerpt.

Why was the company set up? And how did you expand your company and its offerings over the years?

Xoriant’s primary focus has always been a product engineering company for over two decades. Since its inception, the company has grown substantially from being a staffing business to extending its core development and technology capabilities for start-ups. Xoriant strongly positioned itself as an engineering partner with start-ups while working on vertical-oriented product engineering projects. With ecosystem linkages in Silicon Valley, gradual investments in technology and infrastructure, the company strengthened its presence as a preferred technology partner for ISVs ranging from global Fortune 100 to startups. Xoriant’s expertise in innovative technology practices has been a prime mover to offer end-to-end solutions, products and platforms for both digital native companies as well as established high tech companies. From a project-oriented approach to a niche technology player, Xoriant’s journey so far has been progressive.

How successful was your first project? Share the experience.

The first project was a small boutique UNIX shop, which tested the compliance of the UNIX versions of different systems vendors with the industry standards. Since our initial focus was on UNIX, this was our ideal customer where our people just thrived. Our first few projects were very successful. With that success and that reference, we were able to branch out to various systems vendors like Sun Microsystems, HP, Silicon Graphics and Intel and database vendors such as Oracle, Informix and Sybase. Our focus on technology helped us with these technology companies.

What can your peers learn from the challenges you went through?

The most important lesson to learn is focus. Focus is important in terms of market positioning as well as employee training, specialization and retention. It is very important for a service company to claim a unique and deep expertise in a narrow area as opposed to shallow experience in multiple areas. The same issue is important from the employee side also, where employees can get specialized in a few areas. Another important aspect about a service business is that it is all about clients. Any services business begins with a client and grows with a client. Understanding the clients, their unique situation, their current and future needs is very critical so that those needs can be proactively serviced with proper planning and execution. Happy and motivated employees – is another important ingredient of any service business, which is extremely important to offer consistently superior service to the clients.

Between ever-increasing market sophistication, needs, and diversified customer base, many business and IT leaders don’t know what they really have—even when they think they do. How do you manage to resist/serve the needs of highly volatile market?

Xoriant has always excelled in three specific virtues that we believe the technology industry and its users need:

• Experience and capability in building robust software with long product life cycle. This is necessary for technology and software companies, while very useful for enterprises and end users, who want to obtain maximum longevity with their investments.
• Technical ability and methodology to integrate and interoperate different generations of software through our expertise in integration, migration and porting different software components and systems across technologies and architectures. This results in our clients’ ability to leverage innovative technology while utilizing their latest investments and resources.
• Multi-technology and multi-generation expertise with ability to scale up and down and leverage our training and knowledge management capabilities, offering our clients capability of implementing new technology initiatives, while running the current systems/business and have the optimal level of technical capability at the appropriate time.

As technologies and product engineering methodologies keep changing, Xoriant keeps on investing in upscaling our resources, while maintaining the working knowledge of older technologies and methodologies. We have found this as the best way to maintain our value over a long period.

If you have to list five success factors, what would they be and why?

Customer Satisfaction: By achieving the desired outcome parameters of performance, security and scalability, we have gained the trust and loyalty of our clientele that we have worked with. We are proud to attain a track record of 90 percent repeat business and half of our clients have been with us for over five years.

Flexibility: Xoriant brings a highly flexible engagement model to clients in any stage of the product lifecycle. We ensure flexibility with our clients to ensure product quality and timely deliveries. Our senior management has helped through downturns in the market, by allowing them to scale down rapidly or restructure the contractual payment terms.

Early Movers of Advancement in Technology: Xoriant has been in line with the market scenarios and has successfully predicted upcoming technology trends/challenges. With the knowledge and awareness of it, Xoriant provides an early mover advantage to customers by enabling them to stay ahead of their competitors and be prepared for the upcoming tech disruption with innovative and out of the box technology solutions and services well in advance.

End Consumer Advantage: Xoriant’s success has always been on the success of the enterprises that we work with. With the core values in line with our customers, we ensure our end consumer advantage.

High Retention Rate of Employees: To deliver the best to our clients we hire the best. Just as we care about our customers, we make sure the workforce is happier too. At Xoriant, we practice a strong employee-centric culture with multiple skill-building opportunities, foster work-life balance. The average tenure of a Xoriant employee is five years significantly longer than most firms.

How do you maintain your customers’ trust and loyalty?

What sets Xoriant apart is the flexible engagement business model that we have for our clients – from startups to established firms. Our SMEs understand client business and provide advisory and technology consulting considering the future tech needs. We ensure outcome-focused delivery which is not compromised in terms of quality while making their technological investments future proof. Our senior management functions from our US headquarters providing easy access to clients around the world, helping companies with technical, non-technical as well as value-based sales side of the projects.

Girish Gaitonde: A Brief Background

Girish Gaitonde, Founder, is the Chief Executive Officer of Xoriant Corporation. His experience spans engineering, marketing, finance and business development in the technology and services industries. Under his leadership, Xoriant has become a leading product engineering, software development and technology services firm with expertise in emerging technologies and high-performing teams that deliver innovative solutions for both technology companies and enterprises, from startups to the Fortune 100.

Mr. Gaitonde holds an MBA in finance and marketing from the University of Chicago, a master’s degree in computer engineering from Pennsylvania State University and a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, where he is a Distinguished Alumnus.

Mr. Gaitonde is a two-time winner of the Entrepreneur of the Year Award from the Silicon Valley chapter of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, among other awards recognizing his entrepreneurship.

Get in touch:

http://www.linkedin.com/in/girishgaitonde/

www.xoriant.com

“Across all practice areas, we are making significant investments in next-generation technologies and solutions to help deliver innovation to our clients. These include machine learning, hybrid cloud security & compliance, blockchain, IoT data gathering & processing, and open source solution integration.”