Vishal Sikka seems visibly relaxed after posting another set of numbers that have beaten market expectations in his first fiscal as CEO. In an interview with BusinessLine , he outlines what lies in store for the company in the next year.
There have been many positives but as you go into this year, with the US elections coming up and the comment made by Narayana Murthy regarding Indian companies acting as visa agents...what is the way forward?
Currently, there is too much dependence on visas. Having said that, we hire many thousands of people in places like US, Europe, Australia and other places. We are working on being independent of visas and it is possible because of advances in technology such as Virtual Reality and collaborative technologies through which we can do the same thing sitting out of any location.
Yes. Right now, I can’t quantify the impact but it will take some time.
There have been cases where Indian managers have been uncomfortable with foreign staff..
That is not an issue anymore.
You have done some reorganisation. Does it signify end of promoter's influence?
All the three executives have performed exceptionally. It is also the way we build our leadership pipeline. Since I took over, myself, Pravin Rao (COO) and Ranganath (CFO) have had too many things on our plate. Now, they have a chance to take over a sizeable part of operational tasks. We needed this leadership bandwidth.
Innovation and scale often do not go hand in hand. How is it panning out at Infosys?
Software is reshaping the world around us. The future looks entirely different – as it is being fundamentally reshaped by digital technologies.
While I am happy that our company's achievements have yielded results, I am humbled by the task in front of us.
We have to re-imagine the notion of services and this has to be instilled in every one of the 1,94,044 employees. Already with efforts such as zero distance (working with clients very closely) have touched large number of our people.
These efforts have started to show results in the form of organic growth of our client relationships, our win rates in large deals, automation efforts and in the types of projects where we have never participated before.
Ultimately, being large also helps in the sense that you can reach out to large number of people to innovate.
However, we have to bear in mind that innovation is a need as much in good times as in bad times.
How does this translate into hiring?
For freshers, we have made 20,000 campus offers and for laterals we will be looking at ‘just in time’ hiring.