Clairvoyant broadens EXL’s data engineering and cloud capabilities

The Situation: Near the end of 2021, global analytics and digital solutions leader EXL announced it had acquired Clairvoyant, a global data, artificial intelligence (AI), and cloud services firm. This acquisition will strengthen its capabilities by adding cloud enablement and data engineering expertise and further supporting EXL’s clients in healthcare, insurance, retail, banking, and financial services.

You can expect business context in cloud, good overlap on industry verticals, and global presence from EXL + Clairvoyant

• A business-contextualized value proposition for data engineering and cloud services: EXL is not here to sell commoditized infrastructure services; it intends to build long-term relationships with its clients to deliver more than the basics. The companies have overlapping specializations on sectors like banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) and healthcare, providing an added edge.
• Offerings and solutions that now start including CIOs, CDOs and not just EXL’s traditional business operations clients: this enables a wider reach within client organizations covering different levels of the analytics value chain, enabling better connect and visibility.
• A global presence: EXL needs more onshore presence in key client markets, and it believes Clairvoyant’s presence across key locations like Arizona and Texas in the US and Ontario in Canada will help it better cater to onshore clients.

An acquisition several years in the making: Clairvoyant has been a strategic EXL partner in many analytics engagements

Phoenix-based Clairvoyant was founded in 2012; it has offices in the US, India, and Canada. It helps organizations build innovative products and solutions using big data, analytics, and cloud technologies. Clairvoyant provides strategic and architectural consulting across multiple platforms. Its clients rely on its deep vertical knowledge and services to drive revenue growth, enhance operational efficiencies, and manage risk and compliance. Clairvoyant has strengths in partner platforms including Cloudera, AWS, and Google Cloud Platform. The company currently has more than 550 employees, and it is growing quickly. A core belief is “Engineer > Build > Deploy,” a three-step process for accelerating AI and machine learning (ML) processes for organizations to deliver FAASTR (Clairvoyant’s enterprise-grade AI platform) improved business outcomes.

With some awards in its kitty already (HRD Awards 2020, Clutch Top B2B Companies 2020–Arizona, Inc. 5000), Clairvoyant certainly caught EXL’s eye—but the acquisition was far from the first interaction for the two companies. The companies have been partners for more than seven years and worked together across many shared clients. The acquisition was completed in Q4 2021 and is expected to come into play from Q1 2022.

EXL is building collaborations between its operations and analytics practices to define “good” industry and functional process flow and redesigning these into end-to-end data flows, as we found in our research for The HFS OneOffice™ Services Top 10: Data and Decisions.

Supplementing the foundational data engineering and cloud capabilities in EXL’s analytics portfolio

EXL is already delivering solutions to clients with its expertise in running data-led business operations and executing on its enterprise clients’ analytics and data science needs.

Clairvoyant’s data engineering, AI/ML operations, and cloud capabilities will aid EXL in speeding up its digital transformation strategy aligned with its objective of expanding cloud operation capabilities to support the digital transformation. It will also aid in generating quicker value from the cloud-based data and analytics platforms.

EXL is known for its high-value analytics services, and it has always steered clear of the more commoditized and IT-centric data engineering and cloud infrastructure space. However, enterprise customers were struggling to modernize their data estates, and EXL saw that it was missing an opportunity to serve clients’ needs. Its Clairvoyant acquisition gives it better representation across the data and analytics value chain. In The HFS OneOffice™ Services Top 10: Data and Decisions, we ranked EXL No. 5 overall and No. 1 for voice of the customer. The organization’s core strengths according to our research are customer kudos, approach to data and decisions services, strong analytics talent pool with domain expertise, ability to help clients drive value with data and decisions, and technology innovation.

As with any acquisition, EXL needs to focus on the change management needs of the existing employees while also ensuring smooth onboarding of the new team to achieve success in synergies.

The Bottom Line: EXL’s Clairvoyant acquisition is an attempt to elevate data modernization efforts for EXL’s trusted clientele and offer them an expanded portfolio of capabilities from the service provider to get there faster.

Together, EXL’s tailor-made solutions and Clairvoyant’s expertise in cloud, AI, and global data have a shot at excelling at what the two are already good at, however, it needs to focus on the challenge change management needs of onboarding new talent and building synergies with its existing teams if this is to truly bear fruit.