Persistent’s Tech Choice Depends on Partners and Customers

AMARJIT SINGH | CIO | PERSISTENT SYSTEMS outlines the business model followed by Persistent as a typical IT services provider

What are the solutions and services offered in the Persistent Systems portfolio?

Persistent Systems is a software services company. We also have a few products of our own largely in the infrastructure and cloud space. We have a large number of global customers. But the bulk of our business comes from software services. We have major presence in the BFSI vertical and also in Healthcare. A large amount of our services fall in the area of customer engagement, customer connections including these two verticals. We also have a very strong industries vertical where a lot of our offerings are from some of our major partners in the areas of product life cycle management and CLM. This is what Persistent does.

What are the key technology solutions used by Persistent Systems and what are their use cases?

A large amount of our technology choices, given that we work with ISVs and large customers who sell a lot of their stuff, are driven by our customers. But when we are developing our own stuff or when the customer does not have a specific inclination then we are allowed to make our own choice. If I had to go vertically up the stack, on networking we are dependent on some major service providers. If you come to the infrastructure that is where things become interesting because we do work on platforms of virtualization Technologies. We have a private cloud of our own which is a very strong one. We use a mix of open-source and commercial software.
A considerable amount of our internal work or the work that we do for customers runs on the accelerate cloud platform which is a customised and upscaled version of Cloudstack. Then we have very strong teams on openstack. Some of our partners like IBM, use open stack. Redhat themselves are based on openstack. So we have strong competencies in those technologies.

We do use the other virtualization-based form as well be it Vmware, Nutanix or a range of open source virtualization tools. We are a strong AWS partner in many areas especially on the SaaS side. We are also Microsoft Azure partner, and therefore consume and build on AWS and Azure increasingly. We are not that much as of now on Google cloud but we do have partnerships with Oracle in certain areas especially identity.

Which are some of the verticals you have seen maximum traction and who are your marquee customers?

In the BFSI especially we have a Digital bank as an offering which is of course rolled out in association with one of our partners. It allows digital banks to come up very quickly and we have some marquee customers who are currently getting on-boarded there. In insurance and banking we have engaged significantly with the Indian banking sector as well as the Indian insurance industry. Globally more of our presence is in the banking area rather than insurance. We also have other companies in BFSI who are in the investment space where they have offerings that they roll out to other people who use their platforms and the investments area.

One of our large customers is IBM and we are a very strong partnership with IBM in the IoT area. There has been two way flow of IP between Persistent Systems and IBM. We have taken some IP from IBM as our products. They also have many of our platforms being sold through IBM with IBM branding where we get our own royalty. On the industry side, we have some very large customers in Europe particularly in aerospace and some of the other strategic industries. Our big partner there is Dassault PLM offering to these large customers.

What are the significant investment plans in Persistent’s IT agenda in the coming 12-18 months?

Our cloud consumption is up. Our collaboration consumption is up and it will continue to go up. Our bandwidth consumption is not scaling that much because we are not in the facilities that much. But since we are lot into infrastructures.,while bandwidth is not growing too large, the spending will continue because when these employees use the network at home the spending goes up. So our network spend as a company will go up.