A lot has happened since then. But nothing is more impactful than the pandemic that we are going through right now—certainly the strangest and scariest period of our lives.
The IT industry has remained relatively unscathed, certainly as compared to some of the other industries. Almost everybody is working from home, and when they say home, most people have gone back to their native places rather than staying in their rented place in the metros.
So, in a totally unexpected way, our “small town” model of delivering IT services to global clients from non-metros became the norm! At Ideas to Impacts, not only our teams in Pune but even the teams in our Rajgurunagar centre worked from their homes. As it happened in all companies, the IT teams worked hard to set up laptops for everyone, the teams themselves worked extra hours to adjust for this new mode of working, and of course our customers adjusted as well. But together, everybody ensured that the expected quality and productivity were achieved.
Was everything hunky-dory? Not really. The fact is that homes are not meant for work, and it showed up with the unreliability of power and internet—the main reason why most people had to work extra hours. In a social sense, homes with family members going about their routines were not the best set-up for work.
We thought our model of setting up offices in non-metros with the exact same infrastructure that we have in our metro offices was the perfect solution! Now people do not need to “Work From Home,” but they could still “Work From Home-Town” with our model. Indeed, when our offices reopened late last year, we invited anybody in Rajgurunagar working from their homes to work from our office there. win-win for all parties involved.
In my previous blog, I mentioned a US company wanting us to start our centre in a town of their choice. I am pleased to report that this center—our second one—started in Ahmednagar this year. Covid postponed it by almost a year. Some of the work we did for their Machine Learning initiatives ended up being showcased by their CEO at their annual user conferences! It is the kind of work we are doing with Cloud, IoT and AI/ML that made us change the name of our model from “Small Town” to “Smart Town Model” (STM)!
Almost all companies are announcing their plans for remote working even after the pandemic. A couple of state governments announced their policies of equipping their towns with IT infrastructure and offering benefits to entice corporates to move to these towns. Certainly, Covid has given our model a boost, just as Y2K gave a boost to Indian offshoring in 2000.
When remote working becomes the norm, some other subtle problems surface. For example, seniors may be able to work remotely. But how do you get freshers to join the industry while working from home? They need handholding, and our model of creating offices in non-metros addresses this problem too.
Now is the time to scale, and we are exploring various ways to do so:
- BOT model for large SIs
- Adoption-consumption offerings to platform companies, thus going beyond offshore services to get the customers and revenue
- And just seats (with great infrastructure) for companies that would like to use the model
It certainly feels like we are taking a big step this year in “Distributing the Future Evenly.”