On June 22nd and 23rd the Eest Com summit was held in Bucharest as part of the European tour of the Indian Nasscom. All the top clients and suppliers of the European offshore and nearshore sectors were eager to participate. I was invited to be a part of the “Vendors” panel, next to Luksoft. If I haven’t resumed this subject yet, it is because I haven’t taken the time to do it. The high level of McKinsey’s speakers, the maturity of their approach on a range of subjects simply dazzled me. Of course, there are a number of topics which would have deserved to be discussed, but were not, such as the notions of critical size, economy of scale etc. Other subjects could have been better covered. The audience was left wanting for more when the subject of recruitment was approached by the HR panel.

As far as I am concerned, I learned a lot of things in the “Customers” panels on the practice levels of giant clients. I was surprised by the poorness of the supplier analysis made by the CIO of a very large German insurance company. The audience didn’t waste the chance to talk to them afterwards. Why is there no metric system, why are there no KPIs, no SLAs? Then, questions were asked on the new relationship between clients and providers, on true long-lasting partnerships, within precise quality frameworks and the business models that derive from them.

I was particularly charmed by the questions concerning the ramp-up and the large platform training periods, with the inevitable phase during which the offshoring, due to the costs of transfer, training and functioning which is reduced to half at the beginning… becomes more expensive than the previous monthly cost; sometimes twice or three times as much. This period, taking into account the risk felt by customers, and the likely increase in costs during the first year, may undermine the launching of the project. I have personally gone through this phase twice within a very large project. The solutions proposed, based on a genuine financial reflection, are not simple in the field of commercial engineering. The co-financing of this period, if project management is done under a 3 to 5 CMMI constraint, by observing numerous metric benchmarks and SLAs, may lead you directly to an agreement governance carried out by the two general management departments. At this moment, the partnership is very strong and the JV is not far away.

I must confess that with 2 offshore projects at present whose value is over € 2.5 million/year (for several years), three clients which exceed one million a year and a 50/50 JV, Pentalog is particularly interested in these customer-supplier partnership questions. The particularly high level of the consultants and of the audience enabled me to gather information that we are going to include in Pentalog’s offer.

In fact, the senior consultant who organized the event confirmed what I already thought. Pentalog has become the greatest nearshore structure of the European Union . Pentalog is already on the European podium which includes Russia and the Maghreb and is also the leading French-speaking nearshore organization on the world market. Moreover, I would like to add that following some very interesting talks with emissaries of the Tunisian government, we are going to visit Tunis in the months to come.

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