Sunil Paul, chief operating officer (COO) at Dubai-based Finesse, systems integration discusses the company’s business model, market focus and how it plans to expand its influence in the enterprise segment across the Middle East and Africa.
As more enterprise firms look to SIs and solution providers to help them develop robust IT systems, Finesse, a Dubai-based systems integration firm with offices in Canada, India and Singapore, has been honing its solutions offerings to appeal to this sought after market segment.
To make any significant headway in the regional enterprise sector, Finesse is ware that it needs to have the right strategy, skills and domain expertise on board.
The company’s systems integration services include the supply, installation and integration of hardware, software and onsite support services.
“We represent most of the industry leaders in the application space, including Oracle, IBM, Open Text, Software AG, Qlik, Tagetik and Metric Stream,” said Sunil Paul, COO, Finesse.
Paul said Finesse is probably one among the very few focused applications systems integration companies born in the region. “We have a unique three dimensional focus as that vertical domain, technology focus and delivery streams.”
Under the vertical domain, said Paul, the company has banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), education and healthcare. In the technology focus sphere, business intelligence (BI) and analytics, enterprise content management, governance, and risk and compliance, he said.
Paul said from a delivery streams perspective, Finesse has capabilities to offer solution in cloud, mobile and social media. “From a business solutions perspective, we see the market is slowly moving from transactional systems to business performance systems,” he said.
Consequently, Paul added solutions for CRM, BI, corporate performance managemen and customer experience management are gaining interest. “We also see many clients moving from CAPEX to OPEX models, thereby aincreasing significance on pay as you go models such as cloud and software as a service (SaaS),” he said. “As people have changed the way they live and work, it’s only a matter of time that they will need to have their business applications available any time,” he said.
As the managed security services market in the region starts to gain wide acceptance, theYankee Groupis predicting this sector to grow more than 20% per annum.
Paul explained that as business demands becoming increasingly dynamic, systems integration projects are much more complex in nature, involving a number of systems from small to big and spread across hybrid environments. He said the legacy, on-premise, SaaS, cloud and all of them need to work together to achieve the seamless flow, access and analysis of information. “It would be a great challenge for any organisation to internally develop and retain the skills required for ongoing operations and maintenance, when the systems and applications landscape becomes complex,” he said.
Paul added that here is where the opportunity for specialised systems integration companies comes in for them to not just build, but operate as well. He said leading systems integration companies globally have now started pursuing managed services as an integral part of their growth strategy.
“Managed services is one of the key focus areas for Finesse especially in the BFSI space, where we are a top managed services provider in the region. Our core area of business and expertise is in systems integration and enablement of business applications,” he said. “Apart from that we also do BPO, managed services, infra management, HR solutions and training.”
To this end, Finesse is certified by most of its partners for the implementation, training and support of their products/solutions, he pointed out. “We also have a large pool of technical consultants and most of them are trained and certified in their domains,” he said.
However, Paul acknowledged that acquiring functional consulting skills is always a problem for all systems integrators, especially as that this segment of the market has to handle cross vertical and cross technology projects. “We are slowly developing a hybrid model to effectively make use of the special skill sets available across the organisation,” he said.
That said, Paul reiterated the retaining highly qualified IT skills remains a challenge for not just Finesse but many other players in the market. “It difficult for us as for any other SI in the market. However, since our operations are global, we have a lot flexibility for our consultants to work across our offices and that makes it a bit easier for us to handle,” he pointed out.
Looking ahead, Paul said the company is expecting to see rapid growth in the areas of BI and analytics, corporate performance management and customer experience management.
With a total workforce of over 185 professionals and 100 of those based in the Middle East, the enterprise market can expect to see comprehensive solutions offerings that help organisation to address the challenges of the enterprise sector. “We have added a few more exciting solutions to our portfolio in the last few months, including corporate performance management (CPM), governance, risk and compliance (GRC), energy sustainability, customer experience management and social media which are cross verticals,” he said.
