Agility and Maturity Hallmarks of Orion’s Approach to Digital Transformation, CEO Raj Patil Says
Digital transformation is driving business at Orion Business Innovation, President and CEO Raj Patil told NJTechWeekly.com. The Edison-based company specializes not only in the vision part of digital transformation, but in the execution part as well.
Many definitions of “digital transformation” have been bandied about, Patil noted. For Orion, digital transformation is both a new way for its clients to interact with their own customers and to do business using technology.
“This is about leveraging technology so clients can do business in a better or different way,” he said. “We also help companies bring efficiencies, using technology to improve their internal processes. We do work that enables new markets, new revenues and new ways of doing business for our clients.”
Patil and his executive team are scaling the company to be a premium-grade player in the digital transformation space, he told us. “We pride ourselves in the ability to execute, and take those steps in a very fast, agile manner to keep delivering results along a road map. This is also our biggest challenge. With things moving so fast, how do you keep delivering? We are focused on the goal of keeping the true vision of the design constantly in view.”
“Now we are in a more aggressive growth phase. We are expanding our capabilities and expanding our geographical footprint. We are now turbocharged. “Raj Patil, CEO of Orion Business Solutions
Orion has been in business in New Jersey since 1993. Some five years ago, a private equity firm acquired majority ownership in Orion, and Patil became the CEO. “That’s when we started the second phase of our journey. Having built a great organization, we asked ourselves how to scale this company and make it into a platform.” Last October, Orion “brought in a financial partner called One Equity Partners [New York], which is a global, middle market private-equity firm. And from there we are scaling,” he continued.
One Equity Partners orchestrated a merger of Orion with MERA, an outsourced product development company headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland.
Patil said that during the second phase of Orion’s journey, the company had made some small acquisitions. “Now we are in a more aggressive growth phase. We are expanding our capabilities and expanding our geographical footprint. We are now turbocharged.
“We bring a combination of agility and maturity to the table,” Patil stated. “We’ve been around for a while; we’ve done complex work. In today’s rapidly changing environment, you need a firm that can quickly innovate and swiftly deliver and scale.”
Orion brings design to the forefront of everything it does. “We think about what we want to deliver. We have to build things that are usable, but we also want to be able to problem solve, and rapidly prototype, so we can build it at a global scale and manage it for large companies.”
The company has announced two acquisitions so far in 2019. The July acquisition of Behavior Design, based in New York, will help Orion fine-tune and scale its approach to user experience and make its offerings more workable.
“The way we think about it is that the more interesting work we do, the more interesting problems we solve, we will attract people.”
Raj Patil, CEO of Orion Business Solutions
Also announced in July was the acquisition of Cabeus, a Plainsboro-based technology services provider with extensive expertise in pharmaceutical life sciences. “We wanted to expand our domain expertise into the life sciences, so we brought in Cabeus to give us the technical skills and the domain expertise.” The acquisitions also helped the company strengthen its capability with regard to big data and big data analytics, as it moves towards a cloud environment.
While Orion is headquartered in New Jersey, it has offices across the globe. “Of our 3,000 employees, more than 500 are in New Jersey,” Patil told us. “New Jersey is very critical to our success. We have multiple offices and multiple development centers here.”
Acquiring talent is difficult everywhere, Patil noted, because technology is changing so fast and the availability of talent skilled in new technologies is limited. “The way we think about it is that the more interesting work we do, the more interesting problems we solve, we will attract people.”
In New Jersey, Orion is hiring “across the full stack, for senior roles like architects, program managers to run large engagements, and client relationship managers to manage large relationships, all the way down to those who are actually building the technology.”
