By Amy Griffith - Nashville City Newspaper
Nashville, May 07, 2007 - Saurabh Sinha is a local face offering a world of possibility.
His Nashville-based emids Technologies, which the 31-year-old Sinha co-founded in 1999 with college friends, specializes in technology solutions that often utilize on- or off-shore outsourcing.
“Today, the playing field is the globe,” Sinha said. “With the competition being global, every company needs to see global resources to be competitive. We are helping our customers stay very competitive.”
The target market of emids is Fortune 2000 companies, many of which are in the health care sector. The company's global delivery model seems to be working, at least in terms of financial performance. For example, emids doubled in size last year, and expects to do the same this year, Sinha said. Annual revenues last year were just under $10 million.
emids completes a variety of technological services. Some customers need software applications to be managed, while others require the use of development bandwidth to develop programs. The company also completes application work across the board, including workflow, data analytics, financial and human resources applications.
emids has 12 Nashville-based employees who oversee some technology work, but also coordinate and manage workflow for the company. A staff of 183 oversees – primarily in Bangalore, India – takes on much of the company's workload. emids makes use of both local and offshore resources in many of its projects, averaging about 70 percent offshore and 30 percent local, though these figures vary widely depending on the project.
While Bangalore is a cost-efficient city in which to operate a technology center, Sinha said most of his customers don't consider cost to be the primary motivation for outsourcing. Finding the right talent mix is of greater importance.
“I would choose Bangalore for the wide variety and the large pool of skilled resources that they have,” Sinha said. “The cost factor is really secondary.”
Several years ago, Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman wrote an influential guest article in The New York Times, tracking the impact that technological development in Asia had on spurring the growth of American computer companies including Apple and Dell.
The article is one Sinha remembers well. In the case of his company, utilization of global resources will result in an anticipated doubling of its Nashville resources this year. emids is also partnering this spring with Vanderbilt University, engaging three engineering students with emids in the form of a class project. The project is one of six being offered this year as part of a senior undergraduate course in technology marketing.
“Students can be here, working with a local company, and learn about international dynamics. It has a significant local impact,” Sinha said. “The scale and scope of technological innovation, the shortening of product life cycles, the speed of technology transfer and the increasing globalization and digitization of markets in the New Economy makes technology a major strategic variable for companies, industries and nations.”
emids is a finalist for a prestigious Outsourcing Excellence Award from OutsourcingCenter, the publishing and marketing channel for the Everest Group. Hewlett Packard and Unisys Corporation are previous winners of the award. emids was nominated for the honor by its client AIM Healthcare, which is based in Nashville.
A challenge that can exist for companies like emids, which operates a workforce divided between two sides of the globe, is navigating cultural divides. Workers in different countries tend to react differently to problems, and to express themselves in different ways. emids navigates these issues by bringing overseas workers to the U.S. to visit with American customers as often as possible. Sinha also travels regularly himself.
Another potential pitfall for companies that outsource is having the expectation that pay-offs will be fast, Sinha said. Short-term time frames are incompatible with the industry. Steady, measured progress is the key to success, Sinha said, much as it is in other businesses.
Sinha and his college friends founded emids in 1999. At the time, Sinha was living in the Silicon Valley and working at Wipro Technologies, the company that brought him to the United States after his graduation from college in 1997. Few outside investors were brought in when emids was founded. By the time the 2002 technology downturn was finished, most of the other founders had left the company.
“There was an entrepreneurship bug that was going around,” Sinha said. “My friends and I bootstrapped this company ourselves.”
emids moved to Nashville in 2003, largely motivated by company officer and Nashville native John B. “Chip” Saltsman Jr. The health care-rich business environment was “underserved” in the technology and outsourcing arenas, Sinha said.
Sinha adds that he was also drawn to Nashville because he “fell in love with the city” while on a business trip. After living only in the New York and California areas of the United States, he found Nashville very “courteous,” and a good place to raise a family. Sinha and his wife now live in West Nashville.
“This is the largest small city I have seen,” he said.
emids Technologies Inc. is a leading offshore and onshore outsourcing solutions company to Fortune 2000 companies. Based in Nashville, Tenn., with support offices in Bangalore, India, emids is an SEI CMMi Level 3 Company with a proven Global Delivery Model. emids offers its customers world-class information technology and business process outsourcing services, including application development and maintenance, package support, independent testing, quality assurance, health-care claims adjudication, and revenue cycle management. For more information about emids, please visit www.emids.com.