Silo-busting, cloud approach delivers for customers

‘Bottom-Up Disruption’ initiative fuels innovation
Hexaware is a fast-growing automation-led service provider delivering excellence in IT and consulting services. The digitally empowered workforce represents various nationalities, which embody the company’s philosophy of customer success, first and always.

Today, many companies are eager to augment their IT ecosystem, migrate to the cloud, gain efficiencies through automation, improve customer experiences, and save money. They want to do all these things fast with partners they trust.

Founded in 1990 in India, Hexaware has 37 global offices and is a best-in-class digital transformation provider. Hexaware’s three-pronged strategy to help companies succeed focuses on automating everything, taking it to the cloud, and transforming user experiences to create smiles.

Hexaware differentiates itself with a unique bottom-up disruption model that encourages teams delivering customer-centric solutions to become ‘automateers’. Hexaware’s approach recognizes that customer engagement teams are familiar with and often understand customers’ specific problems better than solution architects or higher-level managers.

“Our ‘Bottom-Up Disruption’ initiative excites and motivates teams to develop innovative approaches to solve problems, even beyond the customers’ existing technology roadmaps,” explains Sandeep Arora, Assistant Vice President and Hexaware-ServiceNow Global Partner Lead at Hexaware.

Strategic partnership enables automation
When Hexaware formed its infrastructure management services practice, it identified ServiceNow as the leader in IT operations and service management and established a partnership. Since then, its strategic focus has paid off, as the company has grown its ServiceNow practice annual revenue more than 12-fold in under six years, and now develops vertical solutions to serve customers better.

According to Sunny Raina, Assistant Vice President, ServiceNow Global Practice Head at Hexaware, the company has won most new customers over the past three to four years because of the company’s success in delivering automation for existing customers.

“We have a good rapport in the market,” Raina says. “Customers see us as more than just another service provider. They see us as an elite ServiceNow partner with an extreme focus on automation.”

Better budgets beyond IT silos
Today, many Hexaware customers have large hybrid IT environments and work in IT silos with a range of software solutions, often decentralized and placed in different locations. One division may be ahead in its transformation journey or open to change, while another department might be undergoing a transition or still relying on legacy systems.

One Hexaware customer, for example, had four different service management tools, including ServiceNow. Not only were the teams working in silos, but the company also had to maintain several budgets. According to Raina, “One of the major challenges we have seen is that every CIO and CTO wants to reduce budgets. It makes a lot of sense to have something that connects everything together, and that’s where ServiceNow fits in perfectly.”

Another frequent customer challenge is the lack of awareness regarding the cloud journey. “Everybody wants to transform, but for many, their view of transformation is limited,” Raina continues. “They want to do it, but they don’t understand everything they have to do as part of their digital transformation. That’s where Hexaware fits in nicely.”

Solution and service expertise enables rapid implementation
The ability to deliver implementations quickly is a typical customer requirement, and Hexaware knows how to make it happen. For example, when a Hexaware-ServiceNow airline customer had a contractual obligation to end its existing managed services relationship, it chose a Hexaware managed services contract. The challenge? Hexaware needed to complete the transition in only six weeks. Otherwise, the customer would be penalized close to 40% of its service management spend and subjected to a full year’s charge by its previous services provider.

“Our goal was a zero-disruption transition, and we were able to achieve that whole cutover in the six-week timeframe,” Raina says. “Without our philosophy and expertise, and ServiceNow as a solution offering, I think it would have been difficult to migrate the customer quickly.”

COVID-19 accelerates digital transition
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in Q1 2020, most businesses were affected, and many industries such as travel and tourism, ground transportation, and logistics are still struggling to recuperate. However, according to Raina, one silver lining is that by the beginning of Q3 2020, customers realized the need to transform and focus more on their digital roadmaps.

“What analysts were predicting would happen in 2025 is happening in 2021,” Raina says. “We’ve seen customer problem statements changing. People realized that the future is not going to be what it was pre-pandemic. The pandemic forced people to act sooner. It opened new opportunities for digital transformation or cloud journeys for all of our customers.”

Arora echoed Raina’s sentiment about changing problem statements and solutions. “We have been working with ServiceNow, focused on the healthcare vertical, around the adoption of large-scale vaccinations and safe workplace scenarios. Those problem statements weren’t even a consideration a couple of years ago. It is not only about COVID-19, it is about any scenario like that. We strive to be at the forefront of solving any problem for customers.”

Business transformation opportunities
As Hexaware’s teams work with the customers, they continually consider expanding upon the customers’ existing implementations to provide more benefits. For instance, when considering ITIL practices in IT Service Management, the team looks at how it can help customers refine processes further and identify areas of automation.

“If a customer already benefits from IT Service Management, there may be additional opportunities to use Integration Hub, Software Asset Management, Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC), or SecOps,” Raina says. “As we look at ITSM Pro, for example, which brings a lot of value to all our customers, and join hands with ServiceNow to develop apps, we see a lot of traction. We want to grow as co-sell and co-deploy partners over the next four years, achieving new milestones in our ServiceNow revenue and bringing smiles to our customers.”

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