 ""Technology Architecture Must Be Standard And Proven"")
CFC India Services started operations in India as a captive facility for the US-based Countrywide Financial Corporation (CFC) in May 2004. Since then, the headcount has increased from a hundred employees to about 3800 in the current financial year. The company also acts as a base for CFC’s global operations. Anwer Bagdadi, senior VP and CTO, CFC India Services, speaks with Biztech2.0 about the company’s IT strategy.
What was the IT roadmap when CFC India Services initiated operations in India?
Given the fact that there was a huge growth in the mortgage market in the US, the objective for launching the offshore facility was to outsource activities that would cost less in India, and to keep the growth momentum intact with a similar degree of business process quality.
The parent company considered IT as one of the most important pillars of the India operations. Keeping this in mind, it was very critical for us to create the same technology architecture and platform on the lines of the parent company; to ensure risk mitigation pertaining to technology and business processes – the security platform should be such that it is able to mimic itself as it is in the parent company and the technology platform should be scalable.
Going forward, how has your IT strategy evolved since the launch of the India operations?
Our approach has evolved over a period of time and we want CFC India to be robustly connected with the parent company, both on the lines of the technological roadmap and bandwidth. Network uptime and for scalability were becoming critical factors for operational efficiency. We also understood the importance of connectivity of the India footprint – two locations each in Hyderabad and Mumbai.
To ensure effective connectivity between the locations even in the event of an infrastructure failure, we operate on a dual connection. The shadow connection would take charge in case of any network failure. Now we have enhanced the connectivity to an expanded mesh network after the number of locations increased from two to four. This has been done dynamically to avoid manual intervention.
One should also keep in mind the type of technological architecture being implemented. Rather than being technology driven, architecture should be standard and proven so there are no surprises during implementation. It should align with other applications easily. In fact, any application or software is checked at the CFC lab in the US before it’s deployed for employee use at CFC.
You said the technology architecture should be standard and proven. Could you elaborate on the same?
Basically it means that the technology architecture should fit into the variety of applications that will run on it – be it voice, data, workflow etc. With this, the architecture should be evaluated with respect to risk and security.
We do a thorough testing at our parent company in the US before making any purchase. If the results imply that the technology aligns with the applications and the manageability of the services, it is sanctioned.
In your last four years as a CTO, what have been your most time-consuming activities?
It depends on the phase of the company’s growth. In the first year, we focused on project management. The priority task before us was to come up with a cost-effective facility that is resilient, scalable, and follows the policies and procedures of the parent company.
I have also bisected the IT team into telecom and operations management. The telecom team manages voice-related technologies such as WAN, LAN, data centre, system administration, technology architecture, application hosting, etc. The operations management team ensures that once the processes are in place, the network is up and running. The team is also responsible for managing scalability.
We also felt the urgency to reduce the cycle time of the functions. As the number of business locations increased, we not only wanted them to be connected on a single platform but also develop the capability of working independent of it. Another priority was uniformity of knowledge and information across locations. This enabled contemporary teams at all locations to solve problems in similar ways under the umbrella of parent company’s governance.