Coforge Rejects Palantir Model, Trains Engineers as CEOs

Palantir built a multibillion-dollar business by planting its own engineers inside client companies to run proprietary software, a setup now copied across the industry as the "forward-deployed engineer" model. Coforge is going the other way. The Noida-based IT services firm, whose growth has been outpacing larger rivals, is betting on an enterprise autonomy suite called Nuuron rather than a locked-in platform of its own.

Anup Nair, Coforge's Chief AI Commercial Officer, told AIM the company's engineers are trained to work inside whatever systems a client already has, from legacy claims software at an insurer to years-old backend infrastructure, instead of pushing a new stack on top. That means architecture patterns, execution models and change management built around the client's context, with Coforge's own tools added only where gaps exist. Nair argues this isn't a hedge but a bet that proprietary software has lost its edge now that building it has gotten cheap.

Ravi Vasantraj, Global Delivery Head at Mphasis, has made a similar case elsewhere: owning the intellectual property counts for less than knowing how to apply it inside a specific client's walls. Nair lays out why Coforge thinks speed beats ownership.