Chandra Venkataramani, CIO at Convergys

WHAT WE DO:

“Convergys is a third party, business process outsourcing company. Our customers outsource their very critical customer service and sales efforts to us, and we hire agents across the world, train them in our customer’s business and handle calls, emails and chat sessions on their behalf. That’s the core of our business and it’s highly technology-enabled. We have over 130,000 employees worldwide and our 1,500 people string IT team supports them. We have almost 150 call centers around the world that connects all these employees, so our uptime requirement is Four Nines - we cannot afford to have down time.”

How do you stay abreast of what your competitors are doing in the IT space?

“That’s a tricky one because a lot of them don’t come out and say exactly what they are doing. We get some intelligence through people who join our company from the competition - like me, I came from the competition!  Also, when other public companies disclose their earnings and results, they will publish what they are doing from a technology standpoint, so we can glean from that. But our main source is through our partners – the technology operators who sell us business will come and tell us, your competition, without mentioning their name, is using the same technology to do this and this. So we are able to consider, if it’s an interesting idea, whether we want to go on with it. “