As Global CIO of Hexaware, N Nataraj heads the global activities pertaining to IT in 33 countries; he is also responsible for Infosec Governance (IG). Backed by more than 20 years experience in IT, IS and security, he oversees both in-house service, as well as global practice at Hexaware. Nataraj is a member of the company’s senior management council, Org RISK Management team and also heads the Remote Infrastructure Management business, which he started in 2009. This business recently won a USD 25 million deal from IMS.
A jury member said, “Natraj has led strategic IT initiatives that have led to significant business benefits. For example,
the CRM project has led to better and speedier customer services. The project has been recognized externally in the industry. The business benefits of these initiatives have also been highlighted in certain analysts reports (like the CLSA report).”
Nataraj has incubated and led certain revenue generating initiatives like infrastructure management services, and the cloud computing platform that has led to a significant revenue contribution. Some of his most notable projects that had a major impact on Hexaware’s business are HexaPower, Hexa-Analytics, CRM in Hexaware, and HexaGreen.
HexaPower is an integrated suite of processes, applications and interfaces towards integrated management of applications. Purported towards optimizing the entire lifecycle of an IT project — starting from opportunity, contract, project management insight, cost optimization, billing, invoicing and collection. This helped in providing an integrated framework within the organization across various functions.
With Hexa-Analytics, the focus was set on bringing multifaceted analytics to senior management. It helped in providing the key analytics dashboards to senior management for effective decision making. HexaPower and Analytics brought in resource optimization in PMO/support staff, resulting in savings of approximately Rs 50 lakh per annum. Thanks to the closely integrated systems and the effortless analytics, it introduced enormous savings in manpower, which was earlier deployed for the preparation of data across various practices. Also, it reduced non-billable travel by 50 percent and slashed overall travel expenses by 30 percent. All this boosted Q2 operating margins by 49.8 percent (quarter- on-quarter).
CRM in Hexaware effectively implements CRM within the organization and builds multiple integrations around it with other organizational systems. This led to a single version of truth in terms of pipeline, full sales/pre-sales/ marketing process automation, full-fledged workflow in all these, and better controls. This helped the full sales cycle and related process flow automation and better controls & data repositories.
CRM introduced a 10 percent improvement in the productivity of the sales force. It introduced nearly 50-60 percent improvement in the responses to RFP/RFQ. And since it is centralized, it helps in corporate forecasting and planning.
HexaGreen is a project conceptualized and implemented with multiple objectives such as cost optimization, resource utilization and eco-friendly and green initiatives. After HexaGreen there was a 25 percent reduction in upfront investment. Maintenance for 230 physical servers was no longer required and technical support cost was cut down by 40 percent. Also, license acquisition cost was reduced by 30 percent. HexaGreen significantly helped in the reduction of SG&A cost. It helped in ensuring the elimination of revenue leakage and immediate billability of resources.
Also, it set the way for a cloud-ready environment, for the development of cloud-oriented applications. Under Natraj’s leadership Hexaware won various awards for all these projects. Notable among these are the InformationWeek EDGE Award for Innovation in IT (2010) and the Innovation Award (2007) from Robin Simpson, Chief Bureau, TIME magazine.
More than a dozen members of Natraj’s team have assumed leadership positions at various companies.