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Shaping the future of software driven business
Report of the Directors •
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Report of the Directors
Your Directors are pleased to present the Twenty-Ninth Annual Report of your Company along with the Audited Financial
Statements for the financial year ended March 31, 2019.
This financial year has been a year of transition for your Company. The growth this year was challenging, and your Company
ended the year with revenues of US$ 480.97 Million which was 2.2% growth over the previous year.
Despite the growth challenges, your Directors believe that your Company is in a strong position to capitalize on the opportunities
that are available in the market. Some of the new programs that were initiated during the year took longer to stabilize and they
are expected to provide results in subsequent years.
New Leadership Team
During the year under report, Mr. Christopher O’Connor joined the Persistent Group as the Chief Executive Officer (‘CEO’)
with effect from February 25, 2019. Mr. O’Connor has worked in different leadership roles for IBM for more than 30 years.
He was the General Manager of the IBM IOT business and has been a Persistent customer for nearly 10 years. Mr. O’Connor is
based in the United States and his joining your Company is an important step helping your Company become more global and
multi-national. United States is your Company’s largest market and having a CEO in closer proximity to the customers, should
help your Company to strengthen the relationship with customers.
Mr. Mark Simpson took over as the President of the IBM Alliance Unit from April 1, 2019. Mr. Simpson joined the Persistent
Group three years back after a long career at IBM. Col. Jitendra Gokhale (Veteran) took over as the Head of the Accelerite Unit
in April 2019.
Mr. Sandeep Kalra joined as the President of the Technology Services Unit with effect from May 1, 2019. Mr. Kalra joins your
Company from Harman Connected, a Samsung Company where he was running a similar services business.
Growth and Solutions
During the year under report, your Company set up a team to focus on next generation growth of the Company. The charter
of the Growth and Solutions team is to track and invest to ensure that your Company is seen as a thought leader in the
market. With an aspiration to build domain based and business centric capabilities, growth and solutions teams were set up for
3 (three) industry segments: (i) banking, insurance and financial services; (ii) life sciences and healthcare; and (iii) industrial and
engineering. Technology continues to be the strength for your Company and 4 (four) technology centric growth and solutions
teams were set up to focus on (i) cloud technologies (ii) data and machine learning (iii) security and (iv) internet of things.
2 (two) process-centric teams were established with a focus on product engineering services and partnerships with an emphasis
on Salesforce which is your Company’s largest partner.
The growth and solutions team have started to demonstrate thought leadership in their areas and the work done by these
teams will help your Company differentiate and establish leadership in the market.
Sales Velocity
Your Company has been helping customers in their journey of digital transformation by integrating data from different data
sources and using machine learning to help customers with actionable insights. Your Company decided to apply these principles
to the sales process and established the sales velocity team. The charter of the sales velocity team is to provide salespersons
of your Company a curated and enriched list of potential leads that can help them engage with our existing customers and new
prospects. The sales velocity team has built a software machine to bring together customer data from the various sources such
as news feeds, activities on LinkedIn and interactions that individuals in the Company have with the potential prospects. This
data is combined with data that is present in the customer relationship management system which your Company has deployed
on Salesforce. The software machine can provide salespersons curated leads that can help the salesperson be “smart” about
chasing new customers.
Reseller Business
During the year under report, your Company decided to build a reseller team to be a direct reseller of select IBM products.
Your Company believes that by selling products directly to customers is a first step to becoming a value-added reseller and
have better control of the sales channels for our products. To get this started, a new team was set up in Europe. Your Company
plans to expand the scope of this team to sell other products beyond IBM and geographically extend beyond Europe to the US
and to India.