One on One with Avanade's Aziz Virani

Aziz Virani, executive vice president at Avanade, has only been with the technology consultancy since August, but he was with Accenture, one of the founders of Avanade, for nearly a quarter of a century, when it was Arthur Andersen. "I had always known about Avanade, because Avanade was created before my very eyes," he says, adding he made the switch because he wanted the experience of a smaller, growth-focused company "where I could have a much bigger impact." And Avanade is having an impact—not only is it on the forefront of new technology trends, but cost-cutting ones as well. Virani spoke with Consulting about these oftentimes complementary efforts.

Consulting: In this environment, clients are obviously looking to save money. What is Avanade doing to help clients save money on IT? Virani: Obviously there are major shifts happening in many, many industries. Retail clients are going through massive pain as well with consumer spending being pulled back. So any industry you pick is really going through significant evaluation of their business models and their profitability. And what that's really doing is giving rise to looking at what are we doing with technology and our technology spend. You'd be surprised how many clients I talk to who still don't really have a clear understanding of what are all the licenses [they own]? And [are we] really making use of all the things that we've paid for? We are trying to establish a theme around helping clients think about: What do you already have? Where are you already investing? How can you optimize more with what you already have? And we are talking about various technology solutions that go to that point.

Consulting: What is the average cost savings you're seeing? Virani: It's a bit of a case-by-case basis. For example, if you have a client who has not really experimented or has not really scaled the use of off-shore resources, it is not atypical on an application by application basis for them to see savings of 20 to 30 percent.