And one gentleman who has quietly spent many, many hours in executive boardrooms all over the world helping craft some extremely complex — and sometimes very simple — global services management strategies, is the great bald eagle of sourcing himself, Eugene Kublanov. So, in a long overdue interview, we a delighted to have Eugene with us today to give us his own story…. I think we first met seven or eight years ago, and I seem to remember that you were running a lot of outsourcing engagements and offshoring localization work.
Can you talk a bit about your background and how you got into this business? Thank you; I appreciate the opportunity to catch up. I started in the outsourcing advisory business in , and that was really through a combination of circumstance and accident. Then in , when things sort of came crashing down in that part of the world, I went back to school and was recruited by a firm called neoIT. A few years after I joined, the dot-com bust forced the company to rethink its mission and business model.
We realized that clients really valued our knowledge and expertise as it related to nontraditional IT providers, locations, cultures, and the mechanics of getting the whole offshoring model to work right.
We also realized that the VC community had closed its wallets for the time being. So, we evolved into the first offshoring advisory firm.
I spent nine years at neoIT, the last two as its CEO, and I had the opportunity to work with some very talented professionals who have in their own right taken on leadership positions in the industry today in client companies, advisory firms, and provider organizations. We grew the practice from a handful of us in to nearly 1, shared services and outsourcing advisory professionals globally.
