Phil Fersht [00:12]
Good to get some time with you, Sanjay. Love to hear a bit more on yourself and the company that you’ve been building over the years in Infinite. So maybe you could start by sharing a little about the journey you’ve embarked on, and what inspired you to found this company, and a little bit about you yourself. Is this something that you always wanted to do when you were a young lad, or is this something that just evolved in time?
Sanjay Govil [00:40]
Sure. Thank you so much, Phil. I really appreciate the time, and it’s a great pleasure being here. Entrepreneurship is something which I always wanted to do since I was a kid. I just had the desire to do it. Obviously I went through working in a corporate environment. I came as an immigrant to the United States in the senior year of high school. I went to Auburn University, and then I really got a job which I wanted with IBM in upstate New York. While working there, I did my master’s at Syracuse, met my wife there, and then we moved back to DC. We moved to the DC area because we found this a very nice city to live in. But the desire of being an entrepreneur was always there, and honestly speaking, it was not really planned. One day I just decided to leave my job, and then I embarked on the journey of starting Infinite. I started really small, and like any other entrepreneur, you have a dream and you wanna make a difference, and I was one of those. I’ll be exaggerating if I said that I had an elaborate business plan and I would have made everything work the way my business plan was set up, but that was not the case. There are a lot of good people to help you out, and good karma, and obviously hard work, and the desire to succeed.
Phil Fersht [02:21]
Yeah, the desire to succeed, I think, is critical. When we look at what’s happening in the industry at the moment, there’s an awful lot of polarization and excitement about new technologies in particular. I hadn’t seen obsession like this maybe since the internet days. But what do you see shaping the IT industry at present and in the future, and how are you positioning Infinite to be part of this change and maybe part of this growth?
Sanjay Govil [02:51]
Sure. So as you know, Infinite has had tremendous success as a company, in terms of the verticals we’ve gone to and the horizontal offerings we have. And the key to success of any services company — digital transformation engagement, cloud modernization — is that we have to keep ahead of the technology curve and we have to keep evolving. If you look at the way the service industry has transformed itself in the last 30, 40 years, there have been numerous trends of technologies which have come in. You can start from the mainframe, the client-server, and so on and so forth, the advent of the internet, and now it’s all about cloud migrations, and everybody’s talking about digital engagement, and now obviously AI is the biggest thing. So what keeps it exciting for us is the fact that we need to continuously evolve our company. We have to continue to evolve our great employees, and we have to provide the best value, outcome-based, to our customers. I think that’s what Infinite prides itself on: being a nimble company, an entrepreneurial-led company, a company which is very focused on its customers and continues growing.
Phil Fersht [04:22]
Interesting. And you’ve often referred to yourself as a platformization entity. I’m aware of entities like Turbify from Yahoo, BrassRing with IBM, and Fiserv most recently, but what do you mean by platformization, and how is that taking you forward?
Sanjay Govil [04:45]
Sure. So in the olden days, a typical product cycle used to be three years, four years. Those days are gone. It’s all about how fast you can go to market. You have agile development, you have scrum teams — the whole methodology is changing. It’s really fast development. And the value which Infinite provides is in terms of having pre-made blocks, which are like our platforms which we can deploy, methodologies which we can deploy, and the whole objective is faster go-to-market strategies.
Phil Fersht [05:30]
Yeah, it’s interesting. With the Fiserv acquisition, I’ve heard about this opening doors to many, many banks and credit unions. How do you plan to harness this opportunity? This is a very interesting investment from our perspective.
Sanjay Govil [05:34]
Sure. So we are very proud of our relationship with Fiserv. It’s something which we are very fortunate to get into. And the whole Costa Rica thing also is a great benefit. But more than that, Fiserv obviously is a world leader in what they do, and for us to be associated with them is something which is amazing. It gives us a great reference point and establishes a lot of credibility for us as we embark on a journey to continually grow our financial services practice. So from an Infinite perspective, healthcare is very strong, product engineering is very strong, financial services is going to be very strong, augmented with numerous horizontal offerings like, for example, products like Salesforce, Microsoft, and so on and so forth. So we’re really creating a very nice mix of expertise and client references in those verticals and horizontals.
Phil Fersht [07:07]
Yeah, it’s interesting you mentioned healthcare in addition to financial services. We see that as the hottest industry segment in the market, particularly US healthcare at the moment. So maybe can you talk a bit about the strategic approach you’ve taken to attract talent and forge ahead? And let’s face it, it’s a difficult industry to do well in.
Sanjay Govil [07:29]
Absolutely. I would consider ourselves one of the leaders in healthcare, both providers and payers — all aspects of payers’ and providers’ businesses. Recently, our joint venture with Centera for Optify, which is into Epic migration to the cloud, is something which is of great pride to us. So we have always worked ourselves in these strategic alliances, as well as the great expertise we have. We have some great world-class leaders in healthcare who have done this day in and day out for many, many years. It’s a train-the-trainer model: we have those people at the top, and we continuously bring in talent, and we have them go through extensive training, extensive brown-bag sessions, and then take out the training wheels and put them in front of the client. So we’re very proud of how we have accomplished our healthcare vertical, how we’ve grown, and the same thing we are looking at doing in the financial services industry. And you’re absolutely correct that healthcare and financial services are two industries which are really, really hard. My take is, wherever there’s a lot of compliance, whenever there’s a lot of PII, PHI, security, and those kinds of aspects, the demand for the services obviously grows, and companies who excel and have the business knowledge in those verticals are the ones which are really going to succeed. Because there are a lot of companies who can provide the technical aspects, but having that marriage between the technical aspect and the business aspect is something which is of great importance, which is what Infinite provides.
Phil Fersht [09:37]
Interesting. So what types of services, which go way beyond the technical aspects, are you most proud of in the healthcare sector?
Sanjay Govil [09:47]
I think it’s our ability to make a difference in healthcare. Because it’s very easy to think about technology and purely go from that perspective. But we go from that perspective as well as touching human lives, and I think that’s of great importance to us. Our company Zyter, which is another company which we have, is one of the leading companies in population health. We already have over 30 million members inside it, and it’s all about value-based care — starting from analytics, to identifying people who have conditions and managing those conditions, and providing our Infinite folks to make sure of adherence to the care plans. So we have an end-to-end story there. We are not only working from a technology perspective, which is on the back end for the providers and payers, but we’re also at the forefront with a company like Zyter, for example. We’re also very proud of one of the contracts which we are doing for veteran care. We’re working through our prime where we’re providing the technology for medical disability exams for veterans, and that’s something that we’re very, very proud of also.
Phil Fersht [11:18]
Yeah. So it’s great to hear about what you’re doing there, and about Infinite, and to learn more about the company and the expansion into some critical industries, and your focus on value beyond maybe more legacy ways of doing services. So it’s fantastic to learn more about Infinite today and see a bit more about what you’re doing personally, Sanjay. That’s great to spend time with you.
Sanjay Govil [11:40]
Thank you so much, Phil. It’s been an absolute pleasure. You know, your firm, and you, are so influential in the industry, and to be sitting here with you on this talk is just an immense gratefulness and pleasure. So thank you so much.
Phil Fersht [12:00]
Thank you. Have a wonderful week.
