Sunil Mirani, Chief Executive Officer, Ugam Solutions	A+  A-

Sunil is responsible for long-term vision & strategy, business development and human resources at Ugam Solutions. He brings with him a rich and varied experience of 15 years in Indian and International business.

Previously, he was a part of the core team that was instrumental in establishing Sakura Capital India Limited, a financial services company which is a joint venture of his family's KVS group and The Sakura Bank of Japan. He has been involved with the company since then and was heading the Corporate Advisory function.

His team was responsible for syndication of foreign currency loans, private placement of securities, joint venture advisory services and M& A. He has gained a lot of experience in these areas and was instrumental in helping many Japanese companies successfully implement their joint ventures in India.

Sunil holds a Bachelor of Science Degree in Electrical Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University, USA.

Q: Can you define the growth path of Ugam Solutions since the inception of the company in 2000?
A: Ugam Solutions has grown from one small centre with 16 people to 900 people across 4 centers- 3 in India plus 2 in the US. We started off with about 2-3 clients, now we have over 100 clients.

In terms of business strategy, we could roughly define our growth into three phases. Phase I was the Enter phase wherein we started doing little bit of market research outsourcing that included data processing, survey programming and coding, as well as content management to online retailers. The initial focus was only USA to quickly build credibility and to establish the value proposition

Phase II is called Penetrate and Scale. This entailed doing end-to-end research operations including operations across languages, and countries and from data collection to reporting. We further added advanced analytics capabilities. Content management grew to more of an overall ‘Online Marketing Services’ which included not just content but also SEO (Search Engine Optimization), content management, channel management etc. Hence, we moved from content management to more holistic online Marketing Services.

Phase I lasted approximately from 2000-03, Phase II was roughly from 2003-07. From the year 2008, we are entering Phase III which is all about Leverage and Dominate, i.e., leverage what we have and dominate the spaces which we are operating in. It requires consolidated research operations and market research operations we have because in this space, there are a lot of countries and lots of companies we can explore. Further we grew and accelerated the international data collection capability which we set up last year in London and Mumbai. We have grown the analytics capability, by not only analyzing survey data but moving from survey data to transactional data in analytics and scaling our Online marketing Business.

We intend to scale our business in size, geography and completeness of offering. Another aspect of this growth is going beyond market research firms to different client segments like consulting companies, end clients etc.

Q: Could you please throw some light on the ‘Marketing Analytics’ aspect of your business? What is the market size and future scope for it?
A: We define our business landscape as ‘marketing decision support’, and true business decision support cannot happen only by analyzing survey, but also entails analyzing transactional data. Before we set up marketing analytics capability, we were doing survey research outsourcing only. Our analytics business is all about developing capabilities and strategies to help clients analyse transactional data also, and combined with our capabilities of analyzing survey data, to be able to offer a more holistic solution. The market size- if the market research opportunity in market research operations space is $4bn, then Market Analytics is at least as large. The future scope is significant because unlike the market of the outsourcing of research operations that has begun already 5-7 years ago in 2000, outsourcing of transactional data analysis which is as much an opportunity in terms of size as the research operations has barely just begun. Its scope is far less penetrated than survey research outsourcing.

Q: Ugam Solutions recently opened its International multi-lingual centre in London, UK last year. What are the driving factors behind your geographical expansion? Are you planning to open more centers locally or around the world in the near future?
A: Setting up of the international multi-lingual center in London was a part of a well thought -of strategy. We wanted to have the ability to provide end-to-end research operations. Till then, we had the capabilities on all other parts of survey-research outsourcing namely, data processing, survey programming and coding. We did not have true data collection or the actual interviewing capabilities. By setting up the multilingual center, we have the ability to offer true end-to-end research operation services. By end-to-end, we mean the ability to do interviewing, analysis and reporting across any language, across any country and across any mode of doing interview- whether telephone, online or any combination. This was the need to set up true multilingual or true data collection capabilities.

The reason to pick London was because of the expertise and the immense multilingual capabilities that reside over there. Our focus has been in the B2B area where one needs not just the language skills but the understanding and expertise of doing market research in native language. Our proposition there is the ability to do research amongst the very difficult to do respondents like healthcare, other C-level executives etc. Given that requirement, we thought London is the best place to set up such a center. It also gives us the gateway to marketing into UK and Europe. The factors behind our geographical expansion are always going to be dictated by two key things: client demand/need and delivery capability. What matters to the client is going to be a key driver. The second driver is from a delivery capability perspective. While India will continue to be the centre of gravity for our type of business and for the outsourcing world at large, there are other countries that have capabilities or skill-sets which India may not have.

Q: What are the kinds of clients you have and how much do the European and US markets contribute to your business?
A: Essentially, there are two segments of clients- the market research agencies for whom we provide operations support and online retailers for whom we provide the various online marketing initiatives such as search engine optimization etc- services to improve the effectiveness of their marketing. For the first segment, i.e. MR agencies, we provide high quality, scalable, cost effective operation support – to both the large MR firms and the SME segment. For both of these segments, the approach is different, the capability, the service model is different etc. In terms of Europe and US, US is about 80% of the business, Europe is about 17% remaining 3% being the rest of the world. There is an India component also, into it.

Q: Your company has been recognized as one of the best KPOs to work for, by a leading jobsite. Can you highlight your HR initiatives in this regard?
A: Our HR initiatives start with recognizing HR as a key strategic enabler for business. We call it Talent Management. The position has been given the C-level status as the person heading it is the Vice-President and Chief Talent Officer. Our talent management function is divided accordingly as Talent Sourcing or Recruitment, Talent Development or training and Talent Engagement to carry out Talent Management operations effectively.

Talent Sourcing: Forming strategic partnerships with universities and colleges, programmes like ‘Bring Your Buddy’ where Ugamites can bring their peers into the company. Talent Development has functional and non-functional training through our signature programmes that are appropriately named and branded accordingly:

• LEAP, ALIGN for making sure all the support teams are aligned with the operations at large
• GALLOP for the managers who go to the next level.

This is done typically offsite to make sure it is done in a very conducive environment.

Q: What have been the major challenges in terms of recruiting and retaining employees as Ugam Solutions being a KPO?
A: The challenges are more for us being the pioneer in the field we are in. One challenge is the general attrition due to the markets at large, which is losing not to direct competition but to the other opportunities that may be there, e.g.:- software or other allied industries. (Since it is very well recognized that Ugam is the best in its field to the extent where the competitors have agreed to not even interviewing a particular employee before recruiting if they have “Ugam” on their resume). The only way to retain them for long term is to make sure that we keep them well engaged.

We make sure that the sourcing is done correctly to try and limit lower level attrition. It can happen that we may lose someone because he might not be the best fit which might lead to wastage of time, money and resources. Our efforts are also always on to make sure that proper salary benchmarking and other hygiene factors such as transport, food etc. are taken care of . Finally, it is more about engaging and aligning the employee with the rest of the organization.

Updated on: 16 Mar, 2009