CDI Sets Up New India Operations, Expanding Talent And Service Capabilities

‘We’ve had contractors in India for some time that we’ve been working with. And as we look to scale that business and double or triple employee count, it just didn’t make sense to do that in a contractor-type paradigm. So we incorporated the business to be a legal entity in India to grow it and scale it and do things a little more efficiently,’ says CDI CEO Rich Falcone.

CDI Expanding Its International Presence

Computer Design & Integration formalized its presence in India with the setting up of its own organization, CDI India, to replace its previous strategy of working with contractors in the country for engineering services and support.

The move, which comes just two years since the New York-based IT solution provider launched CDI Europe, is aimed at scaling operations in India where it has been working with contractors, said CDI CEO Rich Falcone.

“As we look to scale that business and double or triple employee count, it just didn’t make sense to do that in a contractor-type paradigm,” Falcone told CRN. “So we incorporated the business to be a legal entity in India to grow it and scale it and do things a little more efficiently. So it’s a formalization of a contracting relationships we’ve had for some time into an official legal entity.”

CDI India will be managed by Sam Shrefler, CDI’s executive vice president for digital services, who joined CDI when his previous company, Candoris, was acquired by CDI in 2021 to build its digital services business.

CDI has had phenomenal success with a team of individuals it has worked with for years in India, Shrefler told CRN.

“So this is really a formalization of that,” he said. “What we’re initially targeting is engineering talent, especially digital engineering talent; software engineering; developers, specifically on ServiceNow, Salesforce, Microsoft platforms; general DevSecOps; enterprise architecture; and integrations development.”

CDI India will also give CDI a “follow the sun” services capability, Shrefler said.

“We’ve got CDI Europe, we’ve got our U.S. presence,” he said. “And now India allows us to continue to follow the sun. We can output a lot more in a 24-hour period. It’s more about, I would say, a testament to the existing relationships that we have there and the team that we’ve been working with and the success that they’ve seen.”

CDI declined to discuss how much it has invested in setting up CDI India or how many people it has there not, but the company is expecting to double its headcount in that country within the next 18 months and to have over 100 employees there within three years.

Falcone had a lot to say about CDI’s expansion into India via its new CDI Business. To learn more, click through the slideshow to read the conversation he had with CRN.

How do you define CDI?

CDI is a hypergrowth technology consulting service provider that’s been in business for 25 years. But it’s had record growth the last three years as we’ve tripled our revenue and tripled our employee count through phenomenal organic growth as well as eight acquisitions. And we continue to bring added value to our customers across many verticals with our deep and wide service catalog as they try to navigate a complicated IT landscape these days with data in multiple hyperscalers, data on prem, securing that data, and automating those workflows. We bring a lot of solutions from hybrid cloud infrastructure through digital workspaces, intelligent operations, helping out with modern applications, and then obviously, keeping it all secure.

CDI is coming up on a billion dollars in revenue. We have employees in over 40 states doing business in 30 countries and looking for more growth. We opened up CDI International a couple years ago. And we’ve had 10x revenue growth there. And the next phase of our international growth is CDI India, which we announced in June, which will give us the ability to bring some great engineering talent to our customers, specifically in our digital and applications practices. It will also allow us to have a follow-the-sun model and continued value of those practices no matter what time of day it is.

Is CDI India the results of an acquisition of an existing organization, or is it building a new organization from the ground up?

We’ve had contractors in India for some time that we’ve been working with. And as we look to scale that business and double or triple employee count, it just didn’t make sense to do that in a contractor-type paradigm. So we incorporated the business to be a legal entity in India to grow it and scale it and do things a little more efficiently. So it’s a formalization of a contracting relationships we’ve had for some time into an official legal entity.

Why now? And why India?

Great engineering talent. And there’s obviously the benefit of the time zones. But it’s really less about that and more about the talent we can access in a way we can bring it to our customers at competitive price points that brings high quality and high service delivery.

And what kind of talent are you talking about?

The two primary consulting practices where this reside are in our digital delivery and our modern applications practice.

So what does CDI get from India that it doesn’t get from some of the other areas where CDI has invested?

We’re doing a lot more application and software consulting in our digital practice, our ServiceNow practice, our Salesforce practice, and our application practice. And with some projects, you can be continuously deploying and continuously improving for years. It’s not like you go install a switch, you plug it in, it’s on the network, and you’re done. So these projects, if they’re done right, don’t really have an end date. You always want to be adding new features. You always want to be bringing new value to the business with platforms like ServiceNow and Salesforce and application development. And you want to do that for customers for applications that are driving revenue and or services that are bringing a better client experience or employee experience.

We all sleep somewhere between six and 12 hours. So to pick up a whole extra half-a-day of continuous delivery to our end users, for a lot of them, that that speeds up their time to revenue and their time to return on investment. But to be clear, you’ve got to do that with the right talent. We started that contractor relationship to make sure we have the right talent. We know we do. And now we just formalized it into a legal entity.

How long has CDI been working with contractors in India?

We’ve had partnerships there, honestly, as far back as 13 or 14 years, if I go back to some of the things we were doing with managed services. This particular group on the digital side, we go back about five years. So it’s a known bunch, like I said. And to scale it, to get it larger than it is now, it just made sense to incorporate it and have it be a legal entity. It’s better for the employees. That was a driving factor in this.

Who’s managing the India team? Somebody in India or in the U.S. headquarters?

We’ve got global leadership that oversees the entire team. And we’ve got team leads and leadership that is diverse and distributed as well. There are managers in India, but eventually that whole practice rolls into Sam [Shrefler] here in the States.

How much is CDI investing in India?

Multimillion-dollars, based on the amount of revenue we’re currently doing and the amount of people we currently have working there.

Given the number of large India-based companies including the likes of Wipro, Tech Mahindra, and Infosys, all of which hire a lot of Indian talent, how do you plan to compete in terms of hiring engineering talent?

I think it’s no different than recruiting talent in CDI Europe and in the E.U., or here. It starts and ends with culture. You have some great companies there. But at CDI, agility at scale is really our mantra. And I think we do a great job of providing scale to our customers and to our employees while still maintaining our quickness and agility. And honestly, our employee retainment rate is phenomenal. I think 4.7 years is our average, and that includes new hires. If I strip out new hires, it’s closer to seven years, I believe. We just have a great culture that is able to retain people.

Look, it’s no different than how do we retain people here in the versus the big five consulting firms in America that we’ve been competing with for the last 25 years, or the big integrators, whether it be IBM Global Services or Tata or any of the big five. We’ve always been competing with them. We compete with our culture.