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Jens Boegh-Nielsen
EMEIA Markets & Business Development, Ernst and Young LLP
Sibjyoti Basu
EMEIA Microsoft & India Alliances & Ecosystems Leader, EY
Key takeaways
With a burgeoning talent pool and expanding captives’ trend, India emerges as a pivotal hub for global strategies.
Strategic skilling empowers our teams to lead with confidence, ensuring relevance and excellence in delivering transformative solutions for our clients.
Early industry alignment and digital-led such as in tax are strengthening EY alliances, enhancing relevance and value for clients and partners.
As organizations expand into new sectors, EY and its alliance partners are collaborating to combine different technology partnerships to create the best solutions for clients.
We must embrace India's potential as a 'sleeping giant' in technology development, spawning new opportunities for innovation and collaboration
Jens Boegh-Nielsen
EY EMEIA Alliances and Ecosystem Leader
Our alliances empower transformative solutions, driving growth and recognition while bridging industry boundaries and converging technologies for client success
Sibjyoti Basu
Former EY India Alliances and Ecosystem Leader
For your convenience, a full-text transcript of this podcast is also available below.
Sudhir: Hello and welcome to the new episode of the EY India Insights ‘Navigating Alliances’ Podcast, a series exploring the intersection of technology, collaboration, and innovation. In each episode, we orchestrate insights, stories, perspectives from across the EY partner ecosystem, our client base, and our leadership to address the important issues and challenges of today.
Jens, Sib, thank you very much for being a part of today's episode. It is a privilege to have you both onboard.
Jens, the first question is to you. What has been the biggest takeaway from your visit to India with regards to the lay of plan for alliance?
Jens: Hey Sudhir, thank you very much. It was an absolute pleasure to spend a full week in India, a week that was long overdue. What stood out the most is probably the passion of our team in India, passion for doing more, and a team that has grown tremendously over the last couple of years. A real appetite for doing more, getting engaged with deals, offering to take on scope services, new projects, not just in India but also across the rest of our client estate.
Another takeaway from my visit was that we met with a lot of our partners with great excitement. We met with SAP; we met with Adobe; we had meetings with Tech Mahindra, Microsoft, and IBM. It was great to see that the connection with all those partners and more, they are eager to do business with EY. Obviously they work with multiple partners (other organizations), but it was really nice to see how much they actually lean in to working with EY; they appreciate the relationship. Some of the conversations were quite frank; one of them that stood out was with IBM that pushed us hard to make sure that we picked the areas where we want to engage, where we want to be collaborating closely with them.
You always feel a little bit when you feel that partners are maybe, if not telling you all, leading you in, but it is because they care, because they want to drive business. It is much better to have these business meetings than just meet for coffee. So, I was really taken aback with the level of interaction, the depth of the conversation, the how much the partners were pushing to do more with us.
I go to a lot of meetings across Europe. I was in the Middle East the week before India and it is great to see when our clients and our alliance partners are really pushing us very, very hard to do more with us. That is a great testimony to the team in India, how closely you are collaborating with our partners, but also a recognition of (the fact) there is a lot more for us to do to connect with service lines, to connect with fields of play, to make sure that what we do with our partners is differentiated from what the competition does.
Sudhir: Thank you very much for that. What are some of the key opportunity areas that you believe we should focus on in the upcoming months and years?
Jens: A couple of areas that stood out when I was doing a tour in India – the confidence of our team in India, the skills, breadth, and capabilities that we have there, not just for EY but across the sector in India – that is going to be a game changer in the years to come.
Having that concentration of talent in IT and business process, that is going to up the rival, certainly in many parts of Europe but also parts of the US. We will see a lot of AI based companies being born in India, more so than in the past, and AI is going to drive the agenda for the next few years. Also, the wave of cap service for global companies that are setting up in India at an accelerating rate, not just to move certain projects up, but moving core business processes to India and having India as the hub from where they run and create new services from. That is an area we really need to get our hands around.
Sudhir: Thanks for that, Jens . Sib, what is your take on that? Would you like to build on what Jens shared?
Sibjyoti: I completely agree with what the Jens shared and his take on India. What has really worked for us, if you honestly ask me, is our early alignment with the industry verticals. That sped up the propositions of partnering with our alliances and made them a lot sharper, in terms of being more relevant to the outcomes, to the problem statement that our clients face in specific industries. Hence, our appreciation of what those issues are and how can we, as business integrators, align some of the insights that we derive from the business side as well as apply that to some of our alliance partners in the solutions that they have to offer. That has really worked for us and hence the success that we see with our clients and the value and the recognition that we get from our alliance partners as well.
Secondly, Jens touched upon the amount of passionate and frugal innovation that is happening in India in terms of the digital assets and solutions and the artifacts that we are building which are powered by alliances. If I look at some of our very solid and robust tax solutions and platforms that we have built out through alliances in terms of the sustainability assets, which are market leading, again these are powered by alliances. Clearly, some of those elements are where our clients see opportunities and challenges and our ability to align and innovate and co-innovate with our alliances has been really very powerful and differentiating for us.
And lastly, if I look at talent, we all know that India is a great platform for accessing deeply capable and technically robust talent. But given the whole talent pool, the vibrancy of the economy, the amount of digital explosion that we are seeing, let me call it ‘digital-on-steroids’, skilling cannot be undermined in terms of what we need to do for our people. The categorical and the programmatic skilling and enablement that we have done for our teams, for our people, relevant to their respective alliances and the platforms, has made us stand out with our clients.
One of the key metrics that we have seen ourselves, which tops the ranks with our alliance partners also, is the amount of focus that we have brought in through the learning skilling and certification at EY. As all of you would know, we have EY badges that are now linked to some of the technical training programs. It has just been a fantastic journey in terms of seeing the outreach that our people are doing.
When we go to campus for new millennial hiring, many of the questions that arise revolve around what we are we going to learn and what the firm (EY) does. We are clearly very proud in terms of the whole skilling journey and the skilling map that we provide our people.
Sudhir: That was very insightful. Jens, you mentioned something that I want to have a bit of a deep dive on. What role do you see India playing in the overall EY global captive strategy?
Jens: India will have a very central role. What I did not realize before was the growing trend of more captives not just re-establishing themselves in India, but also materially growing the scope of services that they run, orchestrate and build out of India.
We see why, and I advise a number of clients to actually embrace this strategy of establishing their centers in India. But one of the things that I certainly discovered more when I was there was the breadth of services that companies are looking to put into the center. We will see this as a massive growth opportunity.
As a part of the campaign activities that we are setting up, we are also looking to go back into the headquarter companies’ countries to make sure that we own the slate of providers that can bid for services for the captives directly In India. We see a lot more purchasing power sitting in those captives. We also had a really interesting discussion with ServiceNow. I spent quite a bit of time with ServiceNow, and this is ideally positioned for them because to sit right in the middle of IT service management or the whole ticketing system, core business services, global business services. We had a really fruitful discussion with them around establishing an experience center in India that they will pay for while we look at how we can position global business services to our client base, how we can use ServiceNow as the core in those captives to help connect with not just the headquarter countries, but multiple countries for the organizations around the globe. And how we can use that as a springboard to build out more services, not just in quality, but around risk, human capital management, and cyber. There are quite a few opportunities, and I am quite excited about that.
We can accelerate this business quite rapidly and as EY we are very well positioned to help our clients with this here; more so than most of our traditional competitors. Just think about what we can do around supporting tax, finance, and assessment of risk, human capital management, and people consulting. There are quite a few opportunities for us where we can differentiate ourselves, we can compete, and we can make a real difference for our clients. This is an untapped additional potential for EY, if I could call it so.
Sudhir: Thank you for that, Jens. Sib, I have a query for you. When you look at India as compared to our peers, what do you see as our strengths and perhaps what would you say are some key takeaways that we can learn from other mature markets and practices?
Sibjyoti: I am sure Jens sees this more broadly than I do, but at least from an India perspective, some of the innovation that we are driving that is built for India, ready for global. And we have seen a lot of success around the assets that we have built out, which clearly makes us stand out among some of the other areas and regions.
Secondly, given that we have got this large talent pool, the amount of clinical coverage that we have done around some of these new age technologies for our people has been very special, outside whatever else I have talked about from an industry and a corporate standpoint. The one area where India has stood out over the last several years among some of our other colleagues has been where our alliances, per se, have been a very strong pivot around how we measure the growth of our business and the impact they have on our overall business as a firm in India, as well as in terms of specific impact on industries and accounts within.
Clearly, that is where India stands out in terms of the penetration that we have been able to get into our accounts and sectors has been very special, which is again, clearly ahead of the pack. An area where we are witnessing a significant trend is that industry boundaries are becoming more fungible – it is no longer one industry. (For example) a large telecom corporation is going into financial services, as we are witnessing in the country as well as globally – increasingly. It requires us as consultants to converge on our all-technology partnerships to offer the best transformative solutions for our clients. It is no longer going to be one product company or one technology partnership that we have, but a convergence of more than one (partnerships) in terms of how we are able to bring in the best of breed solutions to address the transformative outcomes that our clients are trying to achieve.
It is going to be on a product, on cloud or through some of the hyperscalers. It is going to be some data platform that is being leveraged; some agile e-commerce platform that needs to stand out in the next 90 days. If we have those kinds of client expectations, we will need to bring in the larger ecosystem partnerships for alliances as well and the larger extended organization to be able to deliver value to our clients and make ourselves relevant. That is an area where I think we are seeing a clear drift in the marketplace globally as well as in India; something we are picking up as we see this and being more strategic about it as well. Jens, do you see something similar?
Jens: Absolutely. I just wanted to add on to this. We have to recognize the concentration of skills, competencies, and insights that we have in our locations in India. And if you compare it with, say, Gothenburg in Sweden, we have a very small team around ServiceNow there. We might be mature in the sense how we connect with our clients, but when we look at building solutions, when we build a skills base to help us go deep into implementations for our clients, we really need that concentration of skills that can go and build up for our clients. That is where the strength of the centers that we have in India really comes into play. We should continue to push for further integration and collaboration. We should push forward all teams out there; we need to embrace and accelerate what we are doing jointly with our teams and across India. That would be a real strength for us. The deeper and more complex our programs become, the more we need that industrial strength of access to skills and competencies.
As I said earlier, the world has underestimated a little bit what I call the sleeping giant that we have in India. When we look ahead at the next decade, we will see, with strength, there will be more large-scale international IT companies, new software companies that spawn directly in India, not just to provide outsourcing services and other system integration services, but actually born into driving from technology, development, and software. That is going to be super exciting, and we need to embrace that as well. Sudhir: Thank you very much, Jens. That was an intensely insightful conversation. There were a lot of points that we can look back upon. Any last thoughts on your visit to India?
Jens: Just a big thank you for all the hospitality, the great conversations and town hall meetings. I met a lot of people during these five days. It was an eye opener. I see a lot of opportunities coming out of this visit. It was a memorable experience, and I am looking forward to the next visit.
Sudhir: Thank you very much, Jens and Sib, and sharing your expertise and insights today. It has been an absolute privilege having both of you on the show. And on that note, thank you to all our listeners for joining us one more time in the EY India Insights ‘Navigating Alliances’ series.
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