It's not clear whether the other two benefits—economies of scale and approaching customers together are in play here, but efficiencies might well be gained by combining back-office, project administration, and monitoring systems, if not across the entire company, then at least for similar markets.
So far, India's over $100 billion IT industry has been built mostly on software services and back office projects delivered by TCS, Infosys and Wipro for the likes of Citibank and GE, who have been outsourcing non-core work to save costs over the last two decades.
"We have back-office support from project managers and job coaches," he says.
They have suggested the areas would include back-office and property costs, IT projects, recruitment and buying goods and services.
Still, Mr. Spina often clashed with his boss, arguing that the core back-office systems needed as much investment as showy projects like Global Link.
Viewed narrowly, the Mifos project is building a geeky, back-office tool.
A regional system combining back-office functions like bill collection made the billing project unnecessary, the chief executive, Jack Bovender, said.
Peter Barge, the chief executive Jones Lang LaSalle AsaidPacific, said his company was involved in 25 projects in India, most of it for back-office processing rather than high-technology functions.
The first Hudson waterfront projects were conversions of industrial structures, best suited for back-office operations.
In the 1990s they expanded by doing larger software projects and by taking over whole IT systems and back-office functions such as accounting for U.S. and European corporations.
