Datamatics’ focus on publishing industry pays huge dividends

When industry icons like Infosys and Wipro announce depressing results, it means that focusing on verticals could hold the key to growth, and more necessarily, survival. This could also prove to be more important for the IT industry’s current favourite—the BPO sector. Datamatics Technologies, a company focusing specifically on the publishing industry, could provide pointers to the industry. Srikanth R P reports

Datamatics Technologies is India’s only firm and one of the top three global outsourcing companies for the publishing industry, says Manish Modi

The year was 1993. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait brought about the very telling effects of any war—massive loss of life and property. Post-war, the UN set about gauging its after-effects and handing out claims to the affected people. This in itself was no easy task as there were more than seven lakh claims to be handled. In this gloomy scenario, one relatively unknown company, Datamatics Technologies tendered to handle the mammoth contract. While the company hadn’t ever handled an order of this scale previously, the UN showed faith in the company and awarded the contract to the Indian vendor. This marked the entry of the company into a market virtually unheard of then—BPO. Datamatics Technologies was given the task of managing and investigating claims and processing them for adequate compensation.

Sheer volumes
Datamatics CEO Manish Modi recalls that the paperwork was massive, amounting to around 26 tonnes flown in on three Boeing 747 Jumbo jets. To further complicate matters, the claims were in around 12 different languages. Additionally, most of the claims were hand-written. Looking at the complications and the mammoth nature of the project, there were not many organisations that were optimistic about the success of the project. Yet, despite all the obstacles, Datamatics pulled off the project successfully, right from data entry of the claims to developing software for processing the claims, and more importantly validating them. The significance of the project can be seen from the fact that the total value of the claims was close to $50 billion. The success of the project was proof for Datamatics and sceptics that it had the capability to handle large projects in the BPO space.

Strategy
The UN project helped boost Datamatics’ confidence and the company took a conscious decision to focus on the electronic publishing industry, specifically the legal and finance verticals. This was because these verticals were among the biggest in terms of generating content and were always in need of players who had domain expertise. The focus paid off as the company is today one of the few profit-making BPO companies and has been ranked the fifth largest ITES company in India by Nasscom.

Says Modi, “Datamatics Technologies is India’s only option and one of the top three global outsourcing companies for the publishing industry. With our knowledge and experience in the publishing industry, we believe we can achieve a growth rate of over 50 percent in the next two years.”

Names like LexisNexis and Cadmus Communications on the company’s roster are a testimonial to Datamatics Technologies’ success. Lexis-Nexis, one of the largest publishing groups in the world, provides information pertaining to legal cases, public records, business information and even regulatory publications. The group also boasts of one of the largest databases in the world with more than 2600 Terabytes of data, which includes around 12,000 specialised databases. For example, reputed publications like content from The Wall Street Journal and the Time magazine are maintained on some of the databases. Datamatics Techno-logies currently maintains about 800 of the 12,000 databases, creating around 150-200 databases on a yearly basis. The fact that almost every law firm in America uses the LexisNexis network to access information shows Datamatics’ capabilities in this space.

Datamatics is also involved in related software development, tagging the data for context sensitivity and hosting. Another big client is Cadmus Communica-tions, which is one of the world’s largest providers of content to scientific, technical and medical journal publishers. Other than services like conversion and tagging of data, the company also accepts, scrutinises and analyses articles that are submitted for publication in various journals. Datamatics is also involved in helping Cadmus transform itself from a traditional company into an online publishing house. Additionally, the company is also investing substantially in knowledge management practices to gain a competitive edge in the publishing industry. For instance, the company has technology alliances with FileNet Corporation and Hummingbird, two of the biggest players in the knowledge management space.

With the BPO industry following the trend in the software services space, margins in the BPO sector have been coming down in the face of acute competition. Players like Datamatics that focus on vertical markets could prove to be key for survival and growth in a highly competitive market.