By: Philip Joens, Staff Writer | May 20-26, 2016
CEO Rajeev Tandon, who founded Xavient Information Systems in 2002, is shown in the Simi Valley office of the IT service company.
A Simi Valley IT service firm is expanding offices at home and abroad.
Xavient Information Systems, which had revenues of more than $150 million last year, will add 1,000 workers in India and 30 employees in Simi Valley this year as the firm expands its services into new fields because of changing technology.
CEO Rajeev Tandon, who founded Xavient in 2002, expects the company to continue to grow.
Xavient is a software service company that provides development, support and maintenance for clients in the telecom and banking sectors.
The company employs 3,500 people worldwide and 30 people in Simi Valley. It plans to add 30 to 40 jobs at its Simi Valley office and an office in Monterey Park this year. Xavient also has U.S. offices in Atlanta, Denver and Washington, D.C., among others.
Tandon said the U.S. offices communicate with customers about technology on the front end of the business. Two overseas offices in Bangalore, India and Noida, India handle back-end tasks like support, maintenance and testing of systems.
The company already employs about 2,500 people in India. Tandon said the company is investing between $3 million and $6 million in a project that will add 1,000 Indian employees. To make room, Xavient is building a 150,000-square-foot building in Noida, and acquiring a 50,000-square-foot building in Bangalore.
A wall in the lobby of the Simi Valley office is covered with 18 clients, including Verizon, Sling TV and even a relic of the past, Blockbuster Video. The company has built its reputation providing IT services primarily for cable and satellite TV customers like Charter, Dish Network and Comcast.
A TV provider may have an accounting system, a system that analyzes customer interactions and an order management system that processes payments online or by phone. Depending on the company, these systems can be fairly old or fairly new. Xavient helps those systems communicate with each other.
Tandon said the company’s expansion is being driven by rapid changes in technology that are creating a higher demand for its services.
“Our clients want more,” Tandon said. “They want more of the new technologies across their business. They want more mobile, cloud and analytical work done. So the new technologies are giving us a big bump in activity.”
Tandon pointed out there are relatively few media companies, so these systems are typically large and spread out across states, countries and continents. That makes it tough for companies to service this infrastructure on their own.
“We’re the people that maintain support and develop all these systems,” Tandon said. “Pretty much what an internal IT department would do for these companies, but a lot of these systems are so large it’s pretty hard to do it with just your internal IT department.”
Within the past two years, Xavient started offering its services to companies in the financial sector. Its financial clients already include banks like City National Bank and Union Bank. The services are the same as the company offers to its TV clients. Tandon said the company became aware years ago that banks have old computer systems they’re trying to update and Xavient decided to move into the space.
“All the banks are going mobile,” Tandon said. “We see a big opportunity in taking their old legacy systems and taking them where the customers want today.”
As media changes, Xavient is also moving into the entertainment sector. NBC Universal recently became the company’s first client in the entertainment industry.
“That’s also a big opportunity,” Tandon said. “If you look at the market, the way you watch TV is totally different than what you watched two years ago or a year ago. It’s a perfect match because we’re already offering those services to our cable and satellite customers.”
A Cupertino native, Tandon’s parents moved to Los Angeles in the 1970s. He graduated from the University of Southern California in 1993 with a bachelor’s degree in computer science. He could be called a prodigy, but Tandon said he was just surrounded by tech.
His dad, Jugi Tandon, is the father of the floppy disk. Jugi Tandon invented the floppy disk in 1975 and created the Tandon Corporation shortly after to manufacture the magnetic disks and drives. At the time, Rajeev Tandon was just a child. He didn’t go to every conference with his dad, but his dad’s influence rubbed off nonetheless.
“I was just a little kid, so I saw it first hand,” Rajeev Tandon said. “My dad going to conferences and pictures with Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison. Gates was the software guy, Jobs was the hardware guy and my dad was the storage guy.”
Rajeev Tandon founded Xavient in 2002 when he spun the IT department out from another one of his father’s companies. He soon realized profit margins were bigger in software than hardware.
He thinks there’s great opportunities for entrepreneurs between Silicon Valley and Southern California. Because the company has been profitable since day one, Rajeev Tandon’s startup is clearly successful. Despite that, he doesn’t feel he’s made it yet.
“What does made it mean?” Tandon asked. “When I was 20 years old, made it meant I had 100 people working for us. When I was 25 years old, it meant that I want to run a million dollar company. So the bar keeps changing.”