“Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality” - Benjamin Disraeli

What strikes you when you talk to Nimish Soni, CEO, BPO Division, Cambridge Solution, is the conviction and fervor he has for his work and the BPO industry. And this is reflective from the fact that Soni was a pioneer and ventured into the BPO space way back in 1997 armed only with his idea and a vision of what could be. At the time business process outsourcing was not an industry like we know it today and growth was scattered with companies working and growing in islands. Having been in the US for nine years Soni came to India in ’97 to set up the first full service captive insurance BPO center for ADSI US, a subsidiary of American Financial Group (AFG).

“Back then I had no idea about the momentum this offshoring model would take. I got into this simply because it made good business sense and also because it gave me an opportunity to go back to India,” he says candidly. This ‘sixth sense of things to come’ as Milind Joshi, Senior Vice President a Cabridge solutions puts it, has helped Soni stay ahead of his time.

Armed with a mechanical engineering degree UVCE, Bangalore and a masters degree in Manufacturing Systems from the University of Cincinnati, USA, Soni began his career as a consultant with Cap Gemini in the US and in a short span rose to the position of senior consultant where he assumed a variety of roles including IT strategy consultant, technology consultant and business process re-engineering consultant for Fortune 100 clients.

And it was in this capacity, he proposed to the American Financial Group (AFG) the option of setting up a captive BPO in India to reduce costs. “It wasn’t an easy sell because nobody was doing it at that time,” he says. Fortunately for Soni, one of the C level executive at AFG saw the potential of the idea and supported him internally and in 1997 Soni quit his job with Cap Gemini, returned and helped set up one of the first few captive BPOs in India. It was around this time that companies like GE and American Express were also establishing their captive units.

When you ask him about how he got the idea of outsourcing business processes to India, Soni talks about an incident which made him ‘fall off his chair’. While at Cap Gemini, Soni attended a customer meet in the US where vendors were invited to make sales presentations. Apart from teams for big consulting firms there was a lone Indian present and when it came for his turn to talk, the very timid and quiet looking Indian just made one statement --“I can do everything that everyone at this table can do at half the cost.” Everyone in the room was dumbfounded and for Soni this incident was the turning point. “That one statement left an impression on me and got me thinking, and this was 1992-93 when even Infosys and Wipro were fairly small companies,” he quips