Saurabh Gupta — President, HFS Research[00:00]
Welcome, everyone, to today’s episode of HFS Unfiltered. I’m very, very excited about talking to Manohar from iOPEX today, and the reason behind it is we coined this term called services-as-software two years back, and iOPEX is one of the few companies that has been practicing what we preach. They’ve been bringing services-as-software to life.
So Manohar is here with me, and I’ll grill you, Manohar, on what is working, what is not working, and why you like services-as-software. Thanks for being with us.
Manohar Atreya — Chief Operating Officer, iOPEX Technologies[00:34]
Bring it on. Lovely to meet and talk.
Saurabh Gupta — President, HFS Research[00:37]
So Manohar, how do you define iOPEX as you see it today? Because we’ve been talking about moving from traditional services to this thing called services-as-software. But what does it mean in real life? Define it in your own words.
Manohar Atreya — Chief Operating Officer, iOPEX Technologies[00:53]
Thank you, Saurabh. I think this is going to be an interesting discussion.
Services-as-software — I know HFS has been championing this, and we actually like it. Our founders have been evangelizing it as well. And the point about this, and this is what the iOPEX model is, is to look at the business first and look at what outcomes we can deliver to the business.
We have almost two decades of knowledge and experience working on operations of clients, deep inside client operations, with intelligence being embedded into the operations, the workflows, and the processes, rather than doing tech for tech, so to speak.
So I think we’ve always had the legacy of going from the business side, interacting with the business stakeholders, solving business problems using technology as a tool, and, of course, bringing as much codified knowledge and intellectual property to the platform that we take to the clients.
So in simple terms, what I would say is: very outcome-focused, very business-focused. Costs decline for businesses while we are solving this problem, and costs decline every quarter — and this is by design.
You would have heard us say this, but we are founder-led, and we do not have the quarterly treadmill, so to speak. And so we can really push the envelope in terms of delivering outcomes, declining costs. All this effort, and services billing and things like that, we are very, very happy to eliminate, and stay focused on the business. I think we will grow — and we have seen that as well — we will grow with this model, and we’ll solve more problems. So that’s how I would put it.
Saurabh Gupta — President, HFS Research[02:45]
Yeah, I love the point you made, that this is not just technology for the sake of technology. Ultimately, AI and agentic AI is a way of doing things, and unless it’s embedded in the business — that’s why we’re seeing a pilot purgatory right now, Manohar. Everybody’s got a POC or a pilot in some nook and corner of their organization, and hardly anything scales.
But tell me, where are you seeing your clients embrace this approach, this outcome-led, AI-driven, machine-led kind of approach, and where are they still resorting back to the old ways of working?
Manohar Atreya — Chief Operating Officer, iOPEX Technologies[03:24]
Look, we have two big pivots. We have service operations and revenue operations, and we impact business directly. When we talk about revenue ops, it’s everything to do with enhancing revenue for our clients. When we talk about service operations, it’s everything to do with client experience, end customer experience, the experience of the service itself that businesses are delivering to their clients, their customers. So that’s sort of our anchor.
And if you look at where this is becoming successful, and what kind of conversations we are having successfully with the client stakeholders — look, there are three or four personas. We’ve got the CFO and the CIO and the head of procurement, and of course business unit heads within client organizations. And any one of these — and of course we’ve got a bias to work closely with business.
Clients who already have benchmarks, clients who already have ways and means of tracking outcomes — I think those are the personas with whom we are really succeeding.
And if you look at the FTE model, and there are other models as well, like transaction-based models, fixed price models, we’ve experimented with so many of these things in the past. There is a bias to go back to them sometimes, from a procurement organization or the CIO organization. But those who can take the lead — and I’ll talk more about this, who’s taking the lead, and the early adopters — those who can take the lead, those who understand the metrics, those who understand outcomes, I think they are the people who are working more closely with us, and they’re seeing success.
And the personas change, but some of this culture-related change is not very easy to do. I think we are slightly ahead of the market on both pushing this culture change and pushing some of these personas to get more comfortable with outcomes they’re already familiar with. So I think that’s where we are seeing the success.
Saurabh Gupta — President, HFS Research[05:36]
So give me one or two examples to bring it to life, Manohar, whether or not you can name the name of the client — but bring it to life a little bit more.
Manohar Atreya — Chief Operating Officer, iOPEX Technologies[05:50]
Look, one of the huge global ride hailing companies — we have significantly impacted their advertising operations, and this directly brings them revenue. Our analytics and our operations — in the whole global model, this is a US-based client — it directly gets them the benefit of choosing the right advertising campaigns, making the right analytical calls on which campaigns, and how do you charge people who end up paying on their platform. So directly bringing them revenue. And this is a platform that we have taken to this client.
And then we have a cyber security company, one of the top cyber security companies — per-ticket outcomes. Per-ticket pricing on all the support work we have done for them with product support: 400 to below 200, in a very short time, in less than a year, year and a half, using both AI and automation, while the business volume grew at 20 to 30%. So that’s another example I’m quite excited about.
And a third example I would give is a large UK telecom leader. We eliminated almost 6,000 call center roles, and we did orchestration, and we did this in production — not the POCs that you were talking about earlier. This is all production, and this has taken a lot of hard work.
But these are big names, these are Fortune 2000 companies, and these are companies which don’t move in days and weeks. But we’ve been able to bring some of this change to them.
And of course, our Toshiba story, which is public, the kind of productivity gain we have seen with the field implementation is simply amazing. Responses dropping to eight seconds, 20% fewer truck rolls. There are a lot of exciting numbers there. Toshiba is another one, from a field services standpoint, field implementation — an amazing, amazing story as well.
Saurabh Gupta — President, HFS Research[07:54]
Yeah, all four of them are quite amazing stories. But Manohar, when I talk to clients, everybody wants to do this, everybody wants to try and move this. So the intent is practically out there — on day zero. But by day five, we start to discover all these challenges. “I don’t have the right data.” “Oh, what about my process?” “I don’t have the right talent.” “My IT is a mess, I have a spaghetti of 2,000 applications. What will happen if agentic AI comes into that?” And then there’s the whole notion of token economics. How do I budget for these tokens? I don’t even understand this.
And that’s one of the reasons why we’re not seeing the kind of adoption, or why we’re not realizing the AI ambitions that we’ve had. So how are you addressing some of these fundamental issues? Because enterprises — all these Fortune 2000 companies that you’re talking about — they are plagued by these debts. Call it data debt, process debt, tech debt, talent debt. How do we address these problems?
Manohar Atreya — Chief Operating Officer, iOPEX Technologies[09:05]
Look, I’ll be honest here. Not the easiest of problems to solve, and it goes back to a client organization’s culture and all the debt that’s been accumulated.
I think the industry, in my mind — both from maybe the last decade of modernization programs I’ve been part of, as well as what is going on in the last two years with agentic and everything — companies have to embrace some sort of modernization. And it need not be top-down, big bang kind of modernization, because remember, agentic AI need not be applicable to anything and everything you do in an enterprise today.
You have to choose based on your business case. You have to choose the right partner, of course, like iOPEX and others, and figure out where you can see the bang for the buck. And there is process debt, there is a little bit of the culture debt that I talked about, talent is of course there — but then providers like us obviously fill the gaps.
So a deliberate attempt to pick the right business case in conjunction with us, and some of the early adopter personas in enterprises are doing that. And while it’s not easy, it is also not a really hard thing to do, because the piece you pick — you chip away at the process redesign portion, you chip away at some of the data debt. While AI can handle unstructured and structured data, it can’t handle something which is corrupt data. So the foundation has to be strong.
Most of this, we don’t shy away from any of these issues. We have very honest conversations, but we also don’t take the clients down the path of, you’ve got to do a big bang program, you have to do an enterprise transformation to get an agentic project going.
You figure out the business case itself and work with us to find that money, whether it is the bottom line or revenue increase. You find the money along with us, and then we can get something done.
Now, proofs of concept are one thing, but thought to delivery is now days and weeks, considering all the tools that are at our disposal. So proving something and scaling it is something that’s already happened, and we’ve done that with very, very large enterprises.
So while this is a difficult question, we are not shying away from having these honest conversations with clients, and they really appreciate it. They appreciate the fact that we are coming in and saying that we will do something meaningful for you. We do not want you to run a $20 million program to change everything, but we will deliver value. And of course, the pricing is on outcomes, and they love that last part — we are not coming in and saying we are bringing an army and doing the old thing. We’ll price it on outcomes.
Saurabh Gupta — President, HFS Research[12:20]
So what does success mean to you, Manohar? What does success mean to iOPEX? Is it growth? Is it revenue? Is it something else? How are you defining success here?
Manohar Atreya — Chief Operating Officer, iOPEX Technologies[12:32]
We see success as the market embracing our paradigm of revenue ops and service ops significantly, and bringing in services as intellectual property, as software, the way you guys have been talking about, and being able to clear up the debts that we talked about in a very meaningful way, and arrive at a business outcome, like I explained.
But we also have to bet on a few ecosystems. So take something like the ServiceNow ecosystem — sell-with and sell-to and everything. They’re really bleeding edge in terms of adopting AI, acquiring AI-based companies, and taking a whole bunch of solutions to enterprises. So that’s an ecosystem we are betting on.
Salesforce is another big, successful story in the middle of all of this transformation. Their Salesforce core story as well as the Agentforce story are quite intriguing for us, and that’s a significant relationship, a significant ecosystem we are investing in, and we will see a lot of success. We already have seen success — in fact, we have acquired a Salesforce-specific entity in the last year or so.
There are other bets — a lot of partnerships with Databricks, Snowflake, and other big data companies. I think these are a few things which will drive both our entry into new logos as well as expanding some of the larger relationships.
Look, we are working with these bleeding-edge, Valley-based big software companies, from whom we are learning. And we are very glad when we hear that they are utilizing some of our nimbleness and willingness to take those risks and deliver those projects to them. And that’s lovely. So these are some of the best companies who are working with us, and we’ll see a lot of success in these ecosystems as well as expanding on our core.
Saurabh Gupta — President, HFS Research[14:32]
Yeah, no, I think you’re absolutely right. I think we have to see more and more non-linearity coming into the services business. We’ve been talking about non-linear growth for two decades now, but finally, we have a chance to make that happen with this.
But Manohar, this has been a fascinating conversation. Before I let you go, let me ask you this. There’s so much changing in the world right now. If I were to give you one wish that could come true, what’s your big wish? What will help you realize your ambitions?
Manohar Atreya — Chief Operating Officer, iOPEX Technologies[15:10]
Well, I would say more leaders in enterprises become early adopters to seeing the value that can come from this.
The current transformation is nothing short of a generational transformation, preceded by significant modernization programs. In many ways it’s a once-in-a-generation kind of thing. And it’s transformational for all of us as individuals, as well as providers, enterprises, everyone.
I really wish some of the personas I talked about make a deeper commitment to outcome-based models. Something like outcome-based models has been in the press and in all kinds of discussions over the last three decades. And even some who have really gotten it committed could not cross some of the internal gates they have in their enterprises.
I think this is the time for them to seize the moment and work with people like us, and people like yourselves who are advising them, to cross the barrier. Create genuinely meaningful outcome-based models, get the business outcome delivered, work jointly on risks and mitigate them, and be the early adopters.
And it’s almost like the early adopter stage is sort of over, and it’s entering that mainstream adoption phase. I think leaders in enterprises, and everyone else, all other leaders — the more they can be these early leaders who can take advantage of this and harvest this opportunity, working with people like us who are willing to take all these risks and show them proof points and handhold them and take them to the other side and show them the money — we’re doing all of that.
So I wish more leaders adopt this faster than some of them are doing today, and we really have a brave new world where we can see a lot of business value. A lot of it. So that would be my wish.
Saurabh Gupta — President, HFS Research[17:10]
No, this is fantastic, Manohar. I completely agree that this is a generational opportunity. In fact, I often say that this is a category creation moment for us, because for all the time that we’ve been in this industry, we’ve known how to buy and sell services, and we know how to buy and sell software. This is something different. This is somewhere in between.
And I think the more we can learn, both as sellers and buyers, how to buy and sell this, the more adoption there will be. Because I think the technology, to your point, the solutions are ready. There are players and vendors like you who are ready, who are willing to take the risk. It’s a question of: can we get our act together?
So on that note, Manohar, I think this was a fantastic conversation. Thank you for being so upfront, and thank you for sharing your time with us.
Manohar Atreya — Chief Operating Officer, iOPEX Technologies[18:12]
Awesome. Saurabh, looking forward to meeting you in the US on my next trip, or you here in India. It’ll be wonderful.
Saurabh Gupta — President, HFS Research[18:21]
It’s been wonderful. Thank you. Thank you.
