A lot has happened since then. But nothing 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 was suddenly 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 work productivity was achieved.
Was everything hunky-dory? Not really. The fact is that the 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 infra that we have in our metro offices was the perfect solution! Now people need not “Work-from-Home” but could still “Work-from-Home-Town” with our model. Indeed, when our offices re-opened 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 had mentioned a US company wanting us to start our centre in a town of their choice. I am pleased to report that this centre – 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 in 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!
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 infra 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 working from home? They need hand-holding, and our model of creating offices in the non-metros addresses this problem too.
Needless to say, now is the time to scale, and we are exploring various ways to do so:
1.BOT model for large SI’s,
2.adoption-consumption offerings to platform companies, thus going beyond offshore services to get the customers and revenue
3.And just seats (with great infra) for companies who would like to use the model
It certainly feels like we are taking a big step this year in “Distributing the Future Evenly”.