Tech Mahindra

Tech Mahindra is an IT services and consulting company offering a variety of technological solutions and services in addition to business process services. The technology solutions include helping companies engage in cloud software, mobile solutions, network services, and cybersecurity; while business process service is offered across industries, including telecommunications, financial services, retail, energy, hospitality, agriculture, and food beverage. Tech Mahindra is a part of the Mahindra Group.

Tech Mahindra began as a joint venture between Mahindra & Mahindra and British Telecom in 1986. The technology outsourcing firm was split, with British Telecom owning around a 30 percent stake in the company. By December 2010, British Telecom sold stake, around 5.5 percent, of Tech Mahindra to Mahindra & Mahindra. In August 2012, British Telecom sold a further 14.1 percent of its stake to institutional ventures, before selling the remaining 9.1 percent of the British Telecom's stake in Tech Mahindra in December of the same year to institutional investors. The December 2012 sale of equity in the company marked British Telecom's exit from Tech Mahindra.

Tech Mahindra's consulting and technology development solution, NXT.NOW, describes the company's approach in the services they offer. This change was made with the global changes that occurred in 2020, which the company felt invalidated previous models in people operations, methods, technology, and supply chain, among others. The new, three-tier approach to developing client solutions includes the steps imagine, build, and run.

In this paradigm, imagine stands for the company's commitment to helping clients define how an industry will change, and how the company can proactively meet that progression. Build represents the company's commitment to develop systems and processes for clients to overcome and succeed through industry difficulties. And run represents Tech Mahindra's commitment to helping client companies' performance through continuous business operations.

As part of this paradigm shift, Tech Mahindra has also said the company is committed to offering end-to-end strategies and advisory services informed by the company's work in emerging technology trends, including 5G, cloud computing, data analytics, blockchain, artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity.

The company's in-house philosophy to ensuring their solutions remains at the forefront of a given technology. TechMNxT works to provide answers and solutions to client companies with a focus on disruptive technologies, non-linear growth with platforms, and through collaboration with new partners to develop solutions. This is intended to describe Tech Mahindra's holistic approach to developing solutions and technologies.

The strategy focuses on three megatrends, four technology bets, and three outcomes for the companies—what Tech Mahindra calls its 3-4-3 strategy. The three main trends the company is focused on include the development of intelligent devices, the power of new technologies, and the exponentiality of content consumption. The four big bets of Tech Mahindra include artificial intelligence, 5G, blockchain, and cybersecurity. While the three outcome objectives of Tech Mahindra, for their client companies, include to help the client company run better, change faster, and grow greater.

DigitALL is Tech Mahindra's philosophy of comprehensive business transformation. As per this philosophy, the company works to provide digital transformation for stakeholder needs, and organizational goals across multiple business layers, including product/service, business model, and business process. This is intended to use digital technology to help humanize businesses and help them think, sense, connect, communicate, secure, and act better than before.

These different approaches are intended to put an organization on the track of digital evolution with a defined value creation, to help a company avoid wasting needless capital on digital transformations without a clear idea of the intended and possible outcomes. This is further to develop a variety of specific characteristics to help a company stay relevant. They are

• Purpose-driven, technology-enabled businesses
• Providing simple, trustworthy, and sustainable brand experiences
• Focusing on hyper-collaboration between humans and human and machines
• Encouraging the culture of experimentation and value orchestration
• Higher-order learning-organizations using data and cognitive capabilities

The company's DigitALL services include strategy and design services, which are intended to help a client define a digital strategy in context of their business strategy and market needs; digital customer service, intended to help clients engage with customers across the customer lifecycle; intelligent operation services, which work to help client companies use digital technology to improve the efficiency of their business and technology operations; and future enterprise services, which work to help clients experiment with new technologies and determine how to use them to create future opportunities.

Tech Mahindra offers virtual and open RAN solutions through the company's network services and communication services verticals.

For communications, the company focuses on the use of virtualization technologies to help develop access network infrastructures with new capabilities. The company's virtual and open RAN solution offers virtualization of LTE access networks and can help develop 5G networks as the continue to be deployed. This is also considered a lower cost solution, as the virtualization can reduce operations costs. The solution virtualizes network functions over COTS servers and is intended to enable smart and effective control over network resources.

For network services, Tech Mahindra visualizes virtual and open RAN solutions as an enabling technology for IoT use cases and immersive augmented reality and virtual reality experiences, with the solution offering network operators a chance to further develop access network infrastructures with virtual capabilities, beyond a proprietary hardware-based network to a software-defined network. Tech Mahindra emphasizes the flexibility and cost-effectiveness of a software-defined network as compared to a hardware-defined network in this solution, while it offers similar access solutions to those described above, with additional features to help deploy applications towards the edge of the network.

In both contexts, Tech Mahindra highlights the benefits of a virtual and open RAN solution:

• RAN's high-capacity capability of handling heavy data streams to enable new use cases
• Reduction of expenditure and operational costs for networks
• Smart RAN's capability of self-optimization, self-healing, and configuration
• RAN's capability of smart resource allocation based on capacity requirements
• Establishment of architecture qualified to deploy a 5G network with associated IoT use cases

And, in both contexts, Tech Mahindra includes the following in their virtual and open RAN solutions offerings:

• vRAN based small cell solution
• vRAN based micro cell solution
• vRAN based macro cell solution
• vRAN based massive MIMO/AAS solution
• mMwave based solution

As part of Tech Mahindra's development of virtual and open RAN solutions, the company partnered with chipmaker Arm to open a virtual "5G solutions lab," which is intended to provide a live test environment for Arm's customers in chip production, network design, network operations, and enterprise fields for 5G network solutions. Further, it is intended to offer an environment where different developments in the private 5G and open radio networking (RAN) spaces can be mixed and matched to find new possibilities. Those expected to make use of the facility include Google Cloud, Marvell, NVIDIA, NXP, Qualcomm, DISH, Vodafone, Accelleran, Mavenir, Paralllel Wireless, and Radisys.

Tech Mahindra claims to be independent and vendor-agnostic in the solutions the company has built. However, in its virtual and open RAN solutions, the company's prior investment and equity stake in Altiostar, a US-based software company and open RAN evangelist, has brought the company criticism from rivals such as Parallel Wireless and Mavenir. With some suggesting this as an influence, in 2020, regardless of motivations, Tech Mahindra sold the company's stake to Japan's Rakuten, a co-investor in Altiostar. This also deepened Tech Mahindra's relationship with the Rakuten Communications Platform. These moves are seen as part of the telecommunication's industry slow forming of clusters around preferred suppliers, despite the industry's push for open solutions and interoperability.