UST is thriving in the age of talent wars

An introduction to UST: Born a challenger in a rapidly commoditizing industry

When UST was born in California on the eve of the millennium, few could have anticipated its transformation into a significant player in the digital transformation landscape of the 2020s. UST has more than 30,000 employees in 30 countries and a social impact transcending its business footprint. The global IT service provider was founded when a handful of IT “Goliaths” were already emerging and absorbing the demand for engineering and operations talent. UST became a challenger to these much larger rivals by using innovative approaches to work with clients and manage teams and bringing innovative technology architecture.

Flexibility, agility, and responsiveness have been central to the UST story, hallmarks of the company’s work in the services it provides to industries, including BFSI, healthcare, telco, manufacturing, retail, semiconductors, and the public sector. Innovation and an entrepreneurial mindset have been paramount in UST’s growth from an idea into a billion-dollar business with global reach.

An innovator in uniting employee experience (EX) with corporate social responsibility (CSR), UST has committed to diversity and inclusion from its very foundation, a commitment recognized in 2014 by then-US Vice President now-President Joe Biden.

UST began developing a global footprint with bases in the United States and India. It retains strongholds in both countries today, with campuses in Kochi and Trivandrum and global headquarters near Los Angeles, California. UST seeks to reimagine business and the world of work, leveraging emerging technologies to solve business problems and drive value creation with the entrepreneurial spirit emphasizing agility and speed that has characterized it through its journey.

UST hired 10,000 new staff as the world exited the pandemic, and, in a world beset by crisis, the company sought to grow through the storm for the benefit of its staff, clients, and communities. The UST story thus far is one of significant achievement. How it seizes the moment in the crisis-strewn world of the early 2020s will define how it makes the step up to become a premier player across all facets of business services digital horizons.

Uniting EX and CSR in dynamic client partnerships to win the talent war

Crises still beset the business services landscape, as they do the whole world. Climate breakdown, the war in Europe, inflation—the disruption of the pandemic may be receding, but other challenges have taken its place. Supply chains are in disarray, barely recovered from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and now they are in the grip of soaring fuel prices impacting logistics around the world, particularly in Europe. As UST puts it, “It took a global pandemic to expose the true fissures in the mechanism that drives the global economy.”

Meanwhile, the Great Resignation has forever changed workforce aspirations and reshaped the talent equation, as enterprise clients are only too aware. The talent war is hot, and to win it, employers must come to terms with the realities of new workplace cultures and find ways to co-create work environments that attract and retain talent. As our recent survey of 602 global business leaders shows, enterprise challenges range more broadly than talent acquisition and retention, including data security and governance, organizational silos, and poor automation (Exhibit 1).

Exhibit 1: Talent and data disconnects are top enterprise business challenges

Sample: 600 survey participants
Source: HFS Research, 2023

The Great Resignation is teaching us that to have a shot at attracting and nurturing talent sustainably in the future, the global IT and business services industry needs to completely rethink its current understanding of employee experience, culture, skillsets, and talent sourcing. We’ve seen firms adopting short-term measures, including wage hikes, promotions, non-financial incentives, and flexible work environments, but long term, service providers need to invest in sustainable change reflected in their employer branding to attract and retain the best talent.

Talent management is where UST has developed a USP: being a conscientious and innovative employer constantly looking for ways to improve its employee experience, which it knows is deeply linked to the customer experience of its enterprise clients. With humanity, humility, and integrity as its key values, the service provider is committed to amplifying diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in everything it does. It is rethinking how it delivers talent at scale for its clients. Two leading programs exemplify where UST brings new philosophies to shaping technology talent, its Step It Up program and Open Talent Strategy.

Step It Up program: A global apprenticeship program to progress DEI goals

UST’s approach to diversity in talent recruitment and development represents a historic commitment to inclusion, which in the talent war isn’t just good in terms of corporate social responsibility, but an absolute must for the bottom line. UST’s Step It Up program, an initiative designed to train women, minorities, and veterans in tech skills, has operated for nearly a decade.

Partnering with clients such as Penske, UST sees Step It Up as a “global apprenticeship program” that produces trained technologists for the industry within four to seven months. Utilizing UST’s client focus, Step It Up partnerships are tailored to clients’ needs, and until a program graduate is hired, no fee is paid. Step It Up’s results speak for themselves, with 92% of graduates staying with clients for more than three years, 87% being hired, 90% of participants making it to graduation, and nearly 50 clients now actively involved. This is innovative, meaningful change making a difference in communities and unlocking value for businesses.

UST’s commitment to diversity and inclusion stems from its Client Zero approach to embedding EX at the heart of all it does. Anu Koshy, UST’s Global Head of DEI, cites her own experiences as an employee in support of UST’s mission to empower and diversify its workforce:

…we give our people the chance to carve out the career they want, even if that means a change of direction…I used to be a client partner in the consulting world. I enjoyed it, but I wanted to explore something new. I could have applied for roles outside UST, but instead, I was able to move within the business. Now I head up diversity, equity, and inclusion globally, as well as Revenue Ops in the Americas. I’ve been able to have a varied career without leaving the company.

– Anu Koshy, UST’s Global Head of DEI

Open Talent Strategy: Blending the gig economy with the services industry

Diversity and inclusion represent one way that UST applies creativity to helping its clients “bridge the talent gap.” Another is UST’s Open Talent Strategy, which won the GSA’s Changemaker of the Year Award in 2022. As major cities became more expensive, IT service providers have grown their talent base by expanding to secondary cities in low-cost countries. UST recognized the need for a more flexible, agile, and scalable talent base and looked to alternative talent models.

Through its Open Talent service delivery model, UST facilitates clients’ access to a pool of more than 55 million freelancers worldwide in partnership with companies such as Open Assembly. UST’s model provides the service quality assurance and timeliness necessary for clients concerned about just-in-time support. The model works through a blended approach, wherein accredited freelance talent capability is added alongside a UST-dedicated team, providing rapid ramp-up and ramp-down support and specialized skillsets.

This is a departure from how we’ve seen crowdsourced talent work in the IT industry, where they are usually limited to special projects. UST is changing its entire team composition and delivery structure toward a blended model, bringing in organizational change experts to help it navigate the transition. In this endeavor, UST establishes itself as a pivot point within a wider ecosystem, bringing talent to market and enfranchising workers and businesses worldwide.

Leading with business process innovation, following with technology

Over the years, UST has gained significant domain and technology experience, with particular strengths in product engineering (including chip-level innovation) and industry vertical design and consulting, including retail, BFS, healthcare, and manufacturing. UST aligns with HFS in its belief that technology exists to transform business processes rather than for its own sake. UST is also clear that today’s business challenges transcend the silos characteristic of slow-to-evolve organizations, requiring OneOffice™ and OneEcosystem™ responses.

Exhibit 2: Supply chain as a business problem

Sample: 302 retail and CPG executives across the Global 2000 enterprises
Source: HFS Research in partnership with Genpact, 2023

An example of how UST takes a holistic approach to solving business problems for its clients is in how it works with retail and consumer packaged goods (RCPG) clients to address supply chain disruption. As HFS research has shown, three-quarters of RCPG executives believe we are transitioning from traditional linear supply chains to networked ones, with many challenges arising from that, including creating modern value-based supply networks, redesigning supply chains for sustainability, developing resilience, and supporting omnichannel. These challenges coincide with immediate supply chain disruption caused by war, political instability, and climate change.

The pandemic illustrated the need for a rapid and effective transition, given the impact of exogenous shocks on supply chains in a just-in-time era. UST identifies supply chain as a business process innovation case-in-point; it is not “considered as a technology problem…it is core to business function for our retail and manufacturing clients”:

Our supply chain value is delivered through expert consulting services, digital reimagining, with new control towers and new visibility and new platforms, as well as silo-busting and technology problem solving. Our value is that of a holistic business problem solver who can see through silos, eliminate design service debt, process debt, and technical debt and add value via concept and strategy as well as technology architecture and problem solving.

– UST executive

The “Omni” example—a technology solution that helped UST deliver strong business outcomes for its retail client

UST’s capabilities as a “holistic problem solver” are rooted in technology but not reducible to it, and UST is clear that it is led by the problem rather than the technology or the service. UST has addressed supply chain challenges across sectors accordingly, deploying its UST Omni solution in support of clearly-defined client business goals.

UST used Omni, an end-to-end platform, to help a US-based retailer increase revenue while reducing operating costs, identifying the client’s problem as high out-of-stock levels in a context of a saturated market and low consumer spending. Omni gave the retailer, a high-end home designer goods brand, end-to-end visibility and drove a 5% increase in revenue while decreasing operating costs by 7%. Working with an international retail group, UST deployed Omni to visualize the whole of the client’s supply chain, capturing data from its ecosystem, including agents, vendors, and logistics, and enabling real-time collaboration. This slashed lead time from product concept to store to 25 weeks (a 30% decrease) and drove a 9% increase in sales. Technology was used to solve a specific, identified business problem: enabling business process innovation and unlocking value.

UST’s cloud transformation strategy is similarly rooted in solving business problems

CEO Krishna Sudheendra says engaging with enterprise clients is about identifying business problems and deploying the technology. Cloud can be one of the levers because it enables large organizations to improve business agility as the foundation of digital business initiatives, but Sudheendra aligns with HFS Research, saying that to be successful, cloud transformation must be anchored in the business problems you’re trying to solve (see Exhibit 3).

Exhibit 3: HFS principles of cloud-native transformation

Source: HFS Research, 2023

Sudheendra says you can’t “just lift and shift” in cloud-native transformation; business problems have to be identified and desired outcomes planned for to enable an authentic transformation of process in the cloud space. The innovation starts with conceptualizing the problem with the technology as the key enabler to deliver effect in process transformation and unlocking value.

UST knows what it’s talking about here through its longstanding client engagements (including more than 40 cloud-native transformation clients) and its ecosystem partnerships, including SUSE, AWS, Azure, GCP, and Stanford Labs. There’s clear thought leadership from UST in this space, but it is rooted in business realities, seeking to leverage cloud transformation to enable the remaking of operational cultures and processes. With the continuing race to the cloud characteristic of the Great Hurry, the opportunities for genuine cloud native transformations are only beginning.

Multi-disciplined, client-centric delivery strategy in action

As an organization grows, it’s often harder for it to stay connected to what matters—the value of the partnerships forged with clients that made it successful in the first place. Small companies that pride themselves on having a client-centric culture can reach a crossroads when prioritizing scale and growth.

UST has been client-centric from day one and has found a way to get ahead of its scale vs. client partnership challenge. The service provider has restructured its entire organization in the last few years. UST now operates in clusters of one to three accounts; each cluster can make independent decisions and receives support from a lean corporate center. This structure focuses the company on the periphery—clients and their problems—and on small operating units that collaborate, not on self-absorbed siloes.

Authenticity has been, and remains, central to UST’s self-imagining and its go-to-market, as one UST executive told us:

We are not structured around selling services.
We are structured around understanding our clients and meeting their needs.

– UST executive

This quest to build authentic futures in partnership with clients and the entrepreneurial spirit characterizing UST’s internal organization served it well during the COVID-19 pandemic. Sudheendra said the challenge became an opportunity for “reinvention.” UST’s internal organization is driven by entrepreneurial culture and values, executed through agile small clusters” of talent given space to be innovative and develop solutions with the client’s needs embedded from the ground up. This reflexivity is emblematic of the UST way of working and central to its ambitions for OneOffice alignment.

The Bottom Line: UST is positioned well to take on the Goliaths with its commitment to a “boundless” vision and impact.

The past quarter century has been a story of success for UST, of the evolution of a company from an idea into a player in the digital transformation landscape in business services, driving impact for clients and communities worldwide. At present, what UST offers is impressive, and its record of satisfied clients is a testament to a company that has grown to a billion-dollar business in a little over 20 years. To grow further, it recognizes that it will need to continue to take radical steps to change how the industry operates, such as how it sources talent or delivers client engagements.

But there’s more to come. UST’s client-centricity is not in doubt, and its empathy, organizational willingness to adapt to client needs, and agility are great strengths. That will keep its growth story going, underpinned by UST’s commitment to “boundless” imagineering of the world of work and solutions for its clients.

UST’s emphasis on the convergence of consulting, IT, and business services is in tune with the Great Hurry and the pressures on enterprise sellers to be what clients need—and to help clients understand what they need. UST is well-placed to capitalize on this convergence if it can fulfill its promise of consistently going beyond the technical to the business needs driving change.

The values that have driven UST—humanity, humility, and integrity—have forged a unique enterprise that leverages DEI to boost talent acquisition and retention and engaged in sustainability partnerships in many regions. UST has always been about more than the bottom line. But to drive the possibilities of these values further, UST must continue to showcase the “how” of its business problem solving to clients, as well as the why; then, it will be able to take the steps it needs to become a truly OneEcosystem, pushing the digital horizons of the moment.