Avinash Vashistha quits neoIT

After five years of playing advisor, Avinash Vashistha wants to become a risk taker because "we have seen we were leaving a lot of equity on the table."

The advice since 2000 was delivered to clients round the world seeking to offshore through neoIT which Avinash founded (he was chairman and MD) and ran with brother Atul.

Now Avinash is going to muddy his own hands, not just advise and walk away, but take up a stake in the business and at the end of the day earn a multiple of what he would have otherwise.

The new venture that he has floated in the US for this is Tholons Inc. The name is significant and is as global as you can get. One of Lord Shiva's names in Tamil is 'Tholon' and Tholons is an ancient town in France which can trace its lineage back to the Roman times. The company website www.tholons.com will be up in a week.

"The idea is to become partner to somebody who is seeking to globalise a part of his processes, engage in a relationship, take a lead in building a management team, engage in this for a year and then either walk away with five to ten times what would have earned as fees or turn into a pure equity player."

Instead of charging a fee, Tholons will be setting milestones which on being delivered will translate into either payments or equity stakes. The risk part of it is, of course, there is nothing if the milestones are not met.

"We will announce our first engagement in a month and keep announcing a partnership every month. I expect the value of companies with which we will have engagements of this nature will be a billion dollars in five years," predicts Avinash.

He is thinking on a grand scale as he is planning to hold the hands of companies and through that help countries emerge in one or the other offshoring niches on the global scene. The way Avinash sees offshoring panning out, it will be the age of the "best of breed" in specific services.

He visualises a scenario where the Philippines will maybe excel in animation, Sri Lanka in accounting and finance, China in embedded systems and enterprise software, Russia in technology and security, Israel in products and only India in several of these.

He sees himself filling the same gap as Vivek Paul did when he left Wipro to join private equity firm Texas Pacific Group.

"He was the answer to private equity firms' need for people with strategic and operational experience of globalisation to facilitate investment decisions in an age when almost all businesses and services are being impacted by globalisation."

Avinash does not mention names but says, "Take a leading large retailer which has been slow in globalising its process and now wants to do it quick and right and not make mistakes. We will do an outsourcing strategy for them, maybe become an equity partner in their Indian captive, put in people, achieve objectives, have the business running and walk away with five times of what we would have earned as fees."

From 1992 Avinash was aiding Nortel's offshoring around the world from Russia, to China. Then he took a turn at the crossroads in 1996 from when as a director in Nortel he looked after its offshoring in India. Then in 2000 he left Nortel to found neoIT and now he is at another crossroads.

"When I left Nortel in 2000 it was the number one client of Wipro, Infosys and Sasken," he recalls. Watch this space after five years, he avers.