"The current discourse on the issue in the US is driven by emotions" - Rajesh Gopinathan , CEO, TCS

What is your appraisal of the current IT market dynamics?

The global business is transitioning to a new age where technology is playing a central role in the growth of every industry by delivering a superior customer experience anytime, anywhere. The power of a business now depends on its ability to manage the transition from process maturity to data maturity. The Internet of Things (IoT) is about capturing data from machines and sensors; cloud is helping make the data available at scale as and when needed; automation and artificial intelligence are helping sift through enormous quantities of data, and analytics is helping derive insights and make useful predictions from that data.

The explosion of possibilities brought about by Digital technologies is changing the relationship between business and technology, driving Digital reimagination across industries, structurally increasing technology spending, and opening up new growth opportunities for TCS.

Per se TCS, in a largely fragmented market landscape, TCS has historically grown much faster than the market, driven by significant market share gains on account of a superior execution model. In the latest five-year period, while the market has expanded by a CAGR of 1.7% (IT Services CAGR: 0.5%), TCS showed a CAGR of 11.6% in USD terms.

How would you place TCS right now given the protectionist mentality in both Europe and the US and the disruptions happenings in the tech space?

The current discourse on the issue in the US is driven by emotions rather than the economy and the best way to tackle it is through greater engagement. Sometimes, companies like us get characterized is very different from the reality of what we bring to the table. The industry is not an outcome of a visa regulation. We have gone through a huge revolution on the technology side. The sheer extent of technology work globally has expanded many fold and India has emerged as a phenomenal source of high-quality supply for it.

The US has been a very welcoming market for us always. It has provided it with a fair, open and competitive environment. We have competed and we have won against the global best in this country, on equal footing.

The industry is taking steps to meet the new digital transformation requirements of customers just as it transformed itself after the Y2K episode to meet the then e-business needs of the world. Technology has become so pervasive across organisations and so integral to their success that the opportunity for Indian IT had exploded. There has also been an almost unbelievable expansion of the market opportunity for Indian IT. Both within companies and across industries, the addressable IT spend has exploded, given the uses that new digital technologies can be put to.

What would be the direction for TCS in FY 18: the key focus areas and the growth drivers and your Industry outlook?

We are at that kind of a point now where we have experimented with things over the last few years, we know the direction where we are going, all stakeholders believe in it. So, the two key words now are scale and speed. Whatever we are doing, we will do it at scale and faster.

At an organizational level, our three focus areas will be Agile, Automation, and Cloud. The focus areas will shape our solution offerings to our customers as well as guide our internal investments in strengthening our capabilities.

The key differentiators that enable TCS to strategically partner with these large global progressive corporations are our deep contextual knowledge of customers’ business models, functions, processes, and systems; our proactive approach to innovation; and our commitment to delivery excellence. At the core of all this is our ability to attract, develop, and retain talent.