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Version 1

Version 1, Assisting Customers In Navigating The Digital-First Environment We Live In.

Version 1 is an Irish company that specializes in providing various kinds of professional and technological services. The company demonstrates how IT can improve customers’ businesses. Global brands rely on this organization to provide IT services and services that enable customers to succeed. 

About The Company

Founded in 1996, Version 1 is an Irish business specializing in cloud computing, software development, an international management consulting, and software asset management. The company’s staff of over 2000 committed change-makers works relentlessly to create meaningful changes and impartial advice to assist customers in navigating the fast-evolving Digital-First environment we live in. In 2021, the company had a revenue of over €195 million. 

Version 1
Image source: www.version1.com

History Of The Company

Version 1 was founded by Justin Keatinge and John Mullen. It was initially headquartered in Dublin, Ireland. Until 2011 the company had more than 150 consultants working for it and had yearly revenues of over €17.5 million. It was also included on the Deloitte Fast 50 list. The company expanded its Northern Ireland branch in 2014 and opened an office in London, United Kingdom. Version 1 was named as one of the best 50 workplaces in Europe after acquiring the UK-based Tieto Corporation. They later acquired UK companies named Patech Solutions and Roccella Group. By the end of the year, they had eight worldwide offices, over 500 consultants, and yearly revenues of €60 million. In 2017, Volpi Capital LLP acquired the majority of shares in Version 1 in a €100 million buyout of the company. With the money from the buyout, Version 1 was able to increase its activities in UK and Europe. After Justin Keatinge, the previous CEO, resigned in 2017, Tom O’Connor was chosen to lead Version 1. Keatinge stayed on the board of Version 1 and is still a significant stakeholder.

In 2018 the company declared an investment of €1 million in its Innovation Labs, whose core focus areas are: IoT, ChatBots, Virtual Reality, Machine Learning, and Augmented Reality. In 2018 the company acquired Cedar Consulting Ltd., an expert in HR Transformation. 

OneZeroOne, Version 1’s own podcast, debuted in April 2019. The podcast is a collection of interviews with UK and Irish technology and innovation specialists who share their thoughts, insights, and lessons with listeners. Its six podcast episodes are accessible on Spotify, AudioBoom, Deezer, and other streaming platforms.

Partners

Currently, the company works with Oracle Corporation, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services as its three primary technological partners. Version 1 has the biggest Oracle competence in the UK and Ireland and has been an Oracle Platinum Partner for Cloud Managed Services. Since 2006, It has been a Gold Microsoft Partner and has collaborated with the software giant. Version 1 is a Premier Consulting Partner in industries like migration, the public sector, and managed services providers. It was amongst the first Amazon Web Services members in Europe.

Founder – Justin Keatinge, John Mullen

Together with John Mullen, Justin Keatinge launched Version 1 in 1996. Through both strategic acquisitions and organic growth, both have guided Version 1 to become one of Western Europe’s fastest-growing providers of IT services.

CEO – Tom O’Connor

Tom O’Connor assumed the position of CEO at Version 1 in 2017 after serving as the company’s Chief Operating Officer for three years. Tom worked as a management consultant for the first several years of his career before holding executive positions with companies like Andersen Consulting. He joined the company in 2001 and quickly assumed a leadership position in several customer engagements. As a result, he helped to ensure the effective completion of numerous high-profile technical and consultancy services projects.

Mphasis

Mphasis – Assisting Firms in Global Business Transformation From 1993.

Mphasis Group, a worldwide, multicultural organization located in Bengaluru, India, specializes in offering clients worldwide a spectrum of application development and maintenance services, infrastructure outsourcing services, and business and knowledge process outsourcing solutions. MphasiS Limited (MphasiS) was established on August 10, 1992. It was created by the merging of MphasiS Corporation, a US-based IT consulting firm, and BFL Software Limited, an Indian IT services firm. Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Mauritius, the Netherlands, the People’s Republic of China, the Philippines, Poland, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America all have subsidiaries.

History Of The Company

In 1993, the company deployed extra workstations and equipment in order to develop its operations. MphasiS was awarded the ISO 9001-1994 accreditation by BVQ U.K. in 1995. In order to provide high-quality service to its customers, the company was reorganized in 1996 into six independent Business Units (IBUS). Compaq Development Center, Tandem Solution, Applications, Systems and Networking, Products, and Y2K are among them. In 1997, the company signed a long-term software development agreement with the US-based Compaq Corporation. That same year, MphasiS established a dedicated software development center for the US-based Lanier Worldwide, specializing in medical documentation management, and it also formed a strategic alliance with two US-based companies in order to enter the international market. In 1998, the company established a subsidiary in the United States and began a consulting activity to provide higher-margin services. During the same year, the Company launched its first healthcare product in the international market and signed an agreement with Net Communications, a subsidiary of Malaysia’s Netcard Corporation Berhard, to develop and market netKIOS globally.

Mphasis
Image source: mma.prnewswire.com

The Turning Point

Mphasis fortunes have been transformed by a takeover by the US-based private equity firm Blackstone and a fast reversal in the HP channel, which accounts for over 30% of its sales.

In September 2016, Blackstone purchased a majority 60.5 percent share in the Bengaluru-based IT services company from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE). Aside from that, a fast turnaround in the company’s HP business, which had been declining 15-20% each year until two years ago, proved to be a windfall. (HP/DXC is a shared entity/segment that arose after HP merged with another company, CSE, and is now known as DXC.) The turnaround is evident in the stock price of MphasiS, which has nearly doubled (up 93.5%) from Rs 500 on November 11, 2016, to Rs 968 on November 12, 2018. The stock beat most of its peers in the IT sector and the S&P BSE Sensex, rising 30% over this time period. Before this, MphasiS had declined for six years, falling 14% from Rs 581 in November 2010 to Rs 500 in November 2016. During this time, IT equities have risen by nearly 5,000%.

Mphasis At Present

Mphasis’ revenue ranks seventh among its top ten competitors. The top ten contestants have an average of 2.9B. Mphasis’ revenue has increased by 2.9 percent during the last four quarters. In the June quarter, net profit increased 3.9 percent year on year but declined 22.1 percent sequentially to 275.1 crores.
The banking and capital markets and logistics and transportation industries, which expanded 22.1 percent and 21.6 percent year on year during the June quarter, will be the primary drivers of growth.
In Q1, the company obtained new orders of $259 million in total contract value (TCV), with 79 percent of the deals pertaining to ‘new-gen’ services, which essentially allude to its digital business, which includes cloud, automation, and related technologies.

Jeroen Tas and Jerry Rao – Founders

Jeroen Tas and Jerry Rao co-founded MphasiS, an IT company, in 1998, which later merged with Indian IT services firm BFL Software in 2000.
Jeroen co-founded and served as President, COO, and Vice-Chairman of the board of MphasiS, an IT and BPO business bought by HP in 2006. Prior to joining MphasiS, he was the head of Transaction Technology, Inc., Citigroup’s tech lab, where he was in charge of the bank’s customer-facing technologies, such as Internet banking and self-service devices. Jaithirth Rao, often known as Jerry Rao, is a Mumbai-based Indian businessman and entrepreneur. He is the founder and former CEO of MphasiS software and the Executive Chairman of Value and Budget Housing Corporation. Jerry Rao has been regarded as one of India’s top banking and finances minds over the past two and a half decades. Rao was the Chairman and CEO of Transaction Technology Inc, and then the Global Electronic Card Division, before leaving Citi. He also served on Citicorp’s Internet Steering Committee.

Virtusa

Virtusa, a company founded by a group of graduated engineer friends.

Founded in 1996 in Sri Lanka, Virtusa is an Information Technology company that mainly provides IT consulting and outsourcing services. Their main clients are software vendors and large enterprises. Virtusa is an American company and its headquarters are based in Massachusetts, United States. Kris Canekeratne, Tushara Canekeratne, John Gillis, and Sandy Gillis are the founders of the company. Virtusa offers services worldwide and has offices in several countries including India, Sri Lanka, the UK, Germany, Australia, Malaysia, UAE, Qatar, etc. The maximum number of offices of Virtusa is in US and India.

About Virtusa

When Virtusa was founded back in 1996, Kris Canekeratne became the CEO of the company whose valuation today has crossed billions. He took the company public in 2007 but currently it is listed as a private company as it was recently acquired by Baring Private Equity Asia for $2 billion. The company currently has more than 30,000 employees and some of its biggest competitors in the IT sector are Wipro, TCS, Infosys, and Cognizant. All these companies have a very strong market in India along with Virtusa and that raises the competition even more. The company is also known for its community support program that focuses mainly on education. In all these years, Company has established partnerships with many famous companies like Adobe, Azure, Google Cloud, PEGA, etc.

Virtusa
Image source: googleusercontent.com

Founding History of Company

The co-founders of Virtusa belonged to a common friends circle and they were all graduated engineers when came up with an idea to found Virtusa. They thought that the IT sector was ready for a radical transformation as the primitive methods and the way IT systems operated were becoming inefficient. So, they decided to come up with something to move the entire system off-premise, i.e., online models. Initially, they invested from their pockets, and after several maxed-out credit cards, they founded Virtusa.

The main goal behind the company was to help big enterprises with their IT legacy systems by adding some real value to them and not just reducing cost. Kris Canekeratne said that while their competitors were invested in cost arbitrage (providing the same services from lower-cost geographies), Virtusa emphasized engineering arbitrage (providing companies with all the sustainable benefits of software engineering and cost reduction as a part of it). The initial days were undoubtedly challenging because Virtusa approached the clients with a new perspective and it took time to educate the market on the business value they are offering.

Recent Events

Virtusa started making good profits and expanded rapidly after the early years and the post-dot-com bubble burst. In 2009, Virtusa made a very big acquisition for $7.3 million as it bought Insource, a technology consulting company focused on the insurance and healthcare sector. In 2010, the company acquired ConVista Consulting, LLC, a very influential company in the finance sector followed by acquiring another financial service consulting firm, Alas Consulting, LLC. Virtusa acquired OSB Consulting LLC in 2013, a company that specialized in financial services and insurance domains. Some of the other companies that Virtusa acquired in recent years are TradeTech Consulting, eTouch Systems Corp, and Apparatus, Inc. In 2015, Company also acquired a 53% stake in Polaris Consulting & Services Limited, India and the deal was closed for $270 million.

Santosh Thomas – CEO of Virtusa

Santosh Thomas became the CEO of Virtusa in 2021 as Kris Canekeratne stepped away. Thomas has very rich experience in managing large enterprises and also helping them grow and expand from the early stages. Thomas has been around for several years and has witnessed how to lay down strategies so that a company can survive during market transformation. Before joining the company, Thomas was a part of Cognizant’s Executive Committee. Thomas was born and raised in India and holds a degree in marketing and finance.