Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka is revamping the over three-decades-old IT services major; breaking the silos of different business practices by making the consulting arm work together with the sales team to service large clients.
Sikka’s revamping of Infosys comes at a time when the traditional IT services industry is going beyond staffing to solve the client’s needs.
In line with this thought, Sikka has put in place a strategy to break the silos of different business practices within the company.
The company is also working towards devising newer ways to incentivise its sales workforce.
“Till date, our sales personnel were not selling Infosys but consulting and I want to change that,” he said.
The company has identified 100 senior partners and they will work with sales team and look after two large clients each.
Top 100 clients “Focus will be on the existing top 100 clients and another would be on the other 100 clients who we wish to be relevant to,” said Sikka. The office of the CEO will itself monitor the top 15 accounts.
Addressing analysts at the Deutsche Bank (DB) Access Asia Conference at Singapore, Sikka said that out of the 18,000 project managers in the company, 60 per cent have undergone training on Design Thinking.
This strategy is a new way to address an outsourcing customer’s problems, which involves understanding the business as well as behavioural aspects of new technologies on companies across the world. The company has a total workforce of 176,000 people and works with around 950 clients. Sikka however did not give out details with regard to incentives that would be offered, but said that he intends to bring the glory days back to Infosys, when it was offering differentiated services.
Tackling rivals Referring to some of its competition such as TCS and Cognizant, Sikka said that Infosys is being more disciplined when it comes to its sales and marketing efforts, an area where it lagged behind in the last few years.
As an example, he cited the CEO of a Germany-based utility company, which along with its top management visited the Infosys campus in Palo Alto to discuss how it can solve the business challenges faced through design thinking.
He added that Infosys has finished 30 design workshops and has a pipeline of 110 workshops over the next few months, in a bid to reset their engagements.