He dislikes complex solutions, he devises a holistic approach

Arun Jain, chairman of Intellect Design Arena, has not only made a mark as a successful entrepreneur, but also as a fundamental thinker. He did the most unexpcted act of selling off his IT services business to concentrate on products. Manoj Agrawal interviewed him to comprehend his mindset, his journey and the outcome. Edited excerpts:

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Manoj Agrawal: During my tour of the facility, I understood 2 interesting things. First, is you’re not taking the problem as is given to you by the customer, but you are understanding it in greater depth. Second, you’re not applying a template solution. You’re actually designing a meaningful solution. This is not what the IT service industry typically does. How did you come to this new thinking approach?

Arun Jain: Since we are focusing on the banking and financial sector, I will restrict myself strictly to that sector more than other industries. This is amongst the sectors that adopted technology early in the game – it has been there since the 1960s. More the technology is implemented, more the complexity is added. So, older the corporation is, higher the number of software people. Something is fundamentally wrong somewhere, which is leading to patchwork. This complexity hit my mind during my days at Polaris when Citibank was my customer, and we had around 3500 employees at Polaris working for Citibank alone. Polaris was just one of the vendors, TCS had around 6000. So, we are talking of really big numbers. Fundamentally, I asked myself the question - if I have to start a bank and the bank has to offer some ‘n’number of services to its customers, then why should there be so much of complexity sitting in the system!