Model N Testimonial

Model N is an enterprise application company about 10 years old with about 300 people based out of Redwood Shores, California. Model N produces software in the area called Revenue Management which includes functionalities such as pricing, quoting, contract management and rebates processing (analytics and such). We sell to very large pay customers in the life sciences and high tech industries. In the past days, we have been overdoing outsource and offshore development with large companies. In fact, Model N in the past five years we have been engaged in doing outsource and offshore development. In the early days, we engaged with very large vendors such as HCL to do activities such as quality assurance; where we basically received a couple of consultants and they worked for us. But three and a half years ago, the CEO of the company asked me to establish an offshore development center that would be capable of doing software development and not just quality assurance or augmentation or support. Basically what we set up at that point was we put a plan of how quickly we want to ramp up and what do we want to do and we chose to start with the hardest which is actually finding developers, quality assurance people and product managers that could reach a point where they could develop new products out of India. By the way, before choosing India we considered Eastern Europe, China and eventually we choose India because of the quality of schools, the availability of resources, their mastering of English and the legal system which made India a natural choice for us. We wanted to come to India as a way to augment our ability to find resources as we are competing against a lot of companies in the Silicon Valley and because there is a different cost structure that allows us to actually do more with the limited budget that is available to us. So we conducted a very a very detailed RFP process with five other companies such as Sierra Atlantic and upon completion we visited the headquarters of each one of these potential partners and at the end we chose Sierra Atlantic out of Hyderabad, India.

Some of the reasons we choose Sierra Atlantic was that it was obvious from the beginning that this was a different type of organization. It is an organization that has Outsourced Product Development (OPD) and this is not a typical service organization and Sierra Atlantic worked with organizations like Siebel and Oracle to develop real products and you could see that you were talking to engineers and not a bunch of consultants (not to offend anyone). So Sierra Atlantic was a natural choice for us and we got very good attention from the executive level, we felt that they were roughly as the same size as us and last but not least they were located in Hyderabad, which for us was just the perfect city. It was not as stuck in infrastructure as Bangalore and it was not at a early stage as Chennai so Hyderabad was just the right city for us and food is great and the people are wonderful. So we chose Hyderabad and Sierra Atlantic and we signed a contract in March of 2006. Since then we started with an initial team of 11 people which included developers who could write the java codes, couple of quality assurance people and a couple of managers. We trained the people on sight and spent three months with us in Redwood Shores, California and when they came back we started the center in Sierra Atlantic offices and over the years we have grown from that initial set of 11 people about 85 give or take today and we are doing much more than product development right now like professional services, product management, customer support, we have IT functions and all of this with the help of Sierra Atlantic. Some of the things that I can describe about our relationship with Sierra Atlantic if i.e. first and foremost the quality of people we were able to get, the type of interaction we have with individuals at Sierra Atlantic at all levels. Its starts with the way you are greeted at the front desk and all the way up to the CEO of the company Raju Reddy who attends regularly our quarterly business review meetings. So we are really on the first name basis with executive and there is always someone to talk to, we feel very comfortable sharing proprietary business data with Sierra Atlantic and they actually reciprocate. That why we feel this a True Partnership rather than a vendor-client type of relationship.

At time things are challenging and there are always thing that need to be resolved, trying new thing that don’t work exactly the way you expected but we always felt that there was a partner here that we can speak with like someone with whom we can sit around and speak over the phone and actually resolve the issues. So all in all our experience with Sierra Atlantic has been superb and I highly recommend for anyone out there who are an application software company or an infrastructure company, if you are based in Europe or the USA, I will highly recommend that you work with Sierra Atlantic. Now there is so much we can squeeze through a short video clip so I just want to extend the offer for anyone of you who watches this, feel free to contact me or you can get my contact information from Sierra Atlantic and I will be very happy to elaborate or extend on anything so Thank You.

Model N is a leader in Revenue Management solutions, offering an integrated suite of applications for analytics, pricing strategy and execution, contracts, compliance, and settlements optimized for the industry practices of Life Sciences and High Tech companies.

www.modeln.com

• Lowered the total product development costs for the same organization size by more than 30%
• Reduced the cost of some product implementation projects by more than 40%
• As a result of being able to hire a larger team globally for a given budget, were able to achieve at least 20% faster time to market and 30% more functionality