Offshoring in Reverse

Edward Altman joined Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) America in 2002, the U.S. arm of the top Indian IT firm. Formerly an IT leader at 20th Century Fox and Paramount Pictures, he came on board with a Rolodex of contacts in the media industry. Altman had also worked as MGM's CIO and led a project that helped cut the sales cycle of MGM's films to a couple of days from about nine months.

When TCS, which has primarily taken on IT work from U.S. companies, added a media and entertainment department in December 2002, Altman, who had consulted for TCS for a few months, fit the bill to head the new department. "This opportunity was very natural for me, with my background in Hollywood and working with major companies," Altman says. "Hollywood should be able to use TCS's services, and I was excited about the opportunities." Now Altman leads a team that produces and delivers digital content for five movie studios and develops online music.

Infosys Technologies, another top Indian firm, was also looking to get into the consulting business. That's where Stephen Pratt came on the scene. Having worked 20 years in U.S. consulting firms, Pratt was frustrated by the way consultants have worked for decades. "They fly to clients and fly home on weekends," which can be very expensive, Pratt says.

Now that off-site consulting is more possible and productive than in the past, traditional consulting firms need to change how they approach clients, Pratt says. In April, Pratt became CEO of Infosys Consulting, a wholly owned subsidiary of Infosys. Managing a distributed team across the globe, Pratt advises clients without sitting in their offices. "I was in Tokyo a week and a half ago, working with people from India, Japan, and the United States -- and solving problems for a German car company," Pratt says.

Still a startup -- Pratt says the company plans to have 75 employees by the end of the year -- Infosys Consulting aims to rank among the Big Three consulting firms.

With an equally global vision, Francisco D'Souza joined Cognizant, a consulting firm, about 10 years ago. As COO, D'Souza has helped build Cognizant from what started as an Indian-based arm of parent company Dun & Bradstreet into a worldwide operation, whose 12,000 employees are spread across India, the United States, and Europe. If an airplane in the United States is unable to take off, D'Souza brags, his staff in India knows within minutes and works to get the plane off the ground.

Son of a diplomat father, D'Souza was born in Nairobi, Kenya, and lived in 11 countries. "Every three years, we moved from one country to another," he says. Now a naturalized U.S. citizen, D'Souza still trots around the globe and is hardly found at his Teaneck, New Jersey, headquarters.

D'Souza gives out awards to employees, who align their trophies on the table along with family photos. He makes the company's six values a common language of workers from multiple cultures and rotates staff among the company's offices worldwide. "I want to take my experience to build a multicultural environment," D'Souza says.