Welcome to My World: An Interview With Aseem Gupta, CIO of Sogeti USA

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August 2008

What is your role at Sogeti USA?
I manage the infrastructure services for Sogeti. This includes implementation and support of our network, data center, phones, cell phones, infrastructure applications and business applications. My responsibilities include procuring JIT staffing services, procuring, shipping services, managing our travel program and purchasing office supplies for the entire company.

How did you end up in this position?
I originally joined Sogeti as a team member responsible for implementing enterprise applications. I was later promoted to Director of Enterprise Applications, Director of IT, VP of IT and eventually to CIO position.

What are the unique challenges of a CIO for an IT service provider?
Sogeti is an IT service provider with a large number of very technology savvy individuals at all levels. In some ways, it is an advantage for the IT team at Sogeti, as people understand what it takes to implement an IT solution. In other ways however, managers have a tendency of trivializing our tasks because they think they can do it better than us. The reality is that in the right circumstances, they can certainly do it better than my team. The solutions we provide to our clients are certainly more cutting
edge than what we are able to implement internally for Sogeti. Keeping a balance between company expectations around costs and expectations of our consulting groups around the technologies used internally is a unique challenge for us.

What is your biggest priority for the rest of the year?
Our biggest priority is always to maintain high availability of our infrastructure and to find creative ways to reduce our infrastructure costs. Data Center virtualization, Disaster Recovery planning and development/implementation of social networking/collaboration tools are also important priorities for us in 2008.

What types of social-networking collaboration tools/projects are you planning to look at in 2008 and why?
Our focus is around how we can incorporate social-networking concepts to our business applications and achieve productivity enhancements. We are planning to build social networking functionality within our Oracle 11i implementation (using OA framework)
and our SharePoint implementation (using custom web parts). In 2009, we are also considering deployment of MySpace style employee profiles as an internal application. We are already using internal blogs and wikis for communication and collaboration and we are looking at ways we can deploy similar functionality to communicate and collaborate with our customers as well. It's interesting that you ask why we are looking at doing this. I have been in many forums where everyone says that we need to adopt Web 2.0 but nobody seems to know why. For Sogeti, the answer is very simple though. Our consultants are our biggest asset and without them, we will be extinct. Our belief is that social networking will bring members of Sogeti family closer to each other. It will help us make our communities stronger and improve employee participation in practice initiatives. Collaborative approach to solution delivery is helping Sogeti provide better services to its clients in a big way.

What is the most under-rated technology right now?
One of the great things about working for an IT service provider is that no technology is underrated. There is hype about pretty much everything.

What is the most over-rated technology right now?
Some of the Web 2.0 technologies are highly overrated. We believe every company should have a well-defined Web 2.0 strategy and these technologies can change the way companies do business in future. However, companies need to focus on business value that can be derived from using these technologies. We need to re-think the way we build and implement day-to-day applications in future. As a service provider, you work a lot with IT hardware and software companies.

How aggressive are you at implementing the newest technology in your own organization?
We do a substantially large number of pilot projects, which is extremely  important for our business. It works out well for us as our partners like Microsoft and IBM are happy to provide funding for many such initiatives and our consulting organization gets an opportunity to be a leader in those areas. If some of these technologies make sense for our business, we work aggressively to implement those for our own organization.

What will be different about Sogeti USA's IT operations in three years?
Sogeti has grown at a very fast pace in past few years and we expect to continue growing at a fast pace. Our biggest challenge has been to keep up with this growth. One of the areas where we see significant transformation is the way we are managing our network and data centers. In next 3 years, I expect all our servers will be virtual and much more efficient. Desktop virtualization is something that we are adopting in a big way, especially for our global delivery teams working from various parts of the
world. Managing a standard desktop and deploying personal productivity tools for our offshore delivery team was a challenge and desktop virtualization is helping us address that challenge. We are actively deployingVMWare VDI, which gives efficient and reliable desktops for our offshore team. Virtual desktops are also proving valuable in delivering a consistent training platform for training rooms across the country. Our consultants often have short-term desktop needs to install a variety of evaluation
software and virtual desktops are helping us address that as well. Our goal is to be able to deploy a few hundred virtual desktops by the end of this year and expand this capability in 2009.

Given the growth in bandwidth demand, I also see a major transformation in the way we connect our offices. Last, but not the least, I expect to see a meaningful adoption of Web 2.0 technologies at Sogeti in next 3 years.

Sogeti USA LLC is located at 7735 Paragon Road, Dayton, OH 45459