Tata Consultancy Services<\/a> (TCS<\/a>) is focusing on growth and transformation to expand revenue from existing clients by offering them more services, chief executive Rajesh Gopinathan<\/a> told ET's Raghu Krishnan and Bodhisatva Ganguli in an interview, as he draws up a plan for the next five years at the helm. Excerpts:

TCS<\/a> has an outsize influence on the Tata<\/a> group in terms of market capitalisation. How conscious are you of that responsibility\/burden?
<\/strong>
None whatsoever. The way it has been set up, we pretty much run to maximize our business. It's a DNA that gets transmitted because the DNA is very strong. I started at the group level, and I know that 20 years back, other people carried the baton; there were other companies that were as large and as diverse... Today, it is our turn. The analogy is of migratory birds as they fly in a V-formation. The physics of it is that the bird in front creates lift for the next one. Over time, different birds will take up the forward position... That's how we are as a company. In any given portfolio, there will be one or two that are performing very well at any point, which will seed the performance of others. That's the natural progression. If you take a longer view, different companies have (taken the mantle within the
Tata<\/a> group). And still they've managed to run the portfolio and expand it. Today, the seeding that is happening on digital, maybe 20 years later, they will be the ones who will be the leaders.

Logically, it can only be two things. But it could be either that as you said, the digital business?
<\/strong>
Or (Tata Capital) financial services.

Financial services can be the other possibility, or is there some big movement into renewable energy?
<\/strong>
I feel pharma is under-exploited in India. The Covid-19 pandemic has shown that local problems can be solved locally, which means the market is wide open. Pharma is again a major area, and I don't think we have done justice to the companies that are currently there.

The issue with your bird analogy is that it is difficult to see how any other company can match TCS…
<\/strong>
When I joined in the 1990s, Tata Steel and Telco (Tata Motors now) were leading. Who would have thought that it would be TCS now? So, I have seen when others had the same position that we have.

What role is TCS playing in Tata group’s digital initiative?
<\/strong>
We have a trusted role internally, but from our development and technology partner perspective, they are also becoming more and more self-sufficient, especially with new acquisitions. Now they're more standalone. In the early days, we were a larger partner.

In February, you will complete five years as CEO. Have you achieved what you set out to do?
<\/strong>
These five years have been a roller coaster (ride). The first year was all about making sure that we stabilize both internally as well as manage perception. A lot of our time was spent just making sure that we met the customers and gave them the confidence that nothing had changed. This is just a leadership change (taking over from N Chandrasekaran, who became chairman of Tata Sons). Then the last year and a half\/ two years has been this (pandemic). We have also managed to keep things moving. One of the reasons is that we have built on what we have been doing (for long). While it was a big change for me and NG Subramaniam (chief operating officer), the bulk of the team was constant. Their work was constant. By keeping the strategy linked tightly to what they've been doing, and then moving it forward, the level of disruption was minimized to zero. On the business side, we are increasing the focus on the non-CIO organization, staying very grounded about who we are, but attacking the adjacencies so that we rebalance our portfolio.

With vaccinations gathering pace, when will you see people come back to office in large numbers? You had articulated the 25\/25 vision last year…
<\/strong>
The intent of the 25\/25 model was to get feedback from customers and from internal stakeholders. The feedback is very positive. We are right now less than 5% (of employees) in the office. We expect that towards the end of the calendar year or early next year, we will get back to 70-80% in the office. The first target will be to get to 50% of the people (from office) and the rest (remotely). The important point is that we do not intend to segregate our workforce into work from home and work from office. Everybody will have to come into office for a period of time and can have the flexibility to work from home.

Will it be a concern if the Covid-19 wave accelerates in the United States?
<\/strong>
Our expectation is that it's more of a hiccup rather than a major listing because it's unlikely that it will result in the kind of healthcare scare that the others had. Most of the companies that we work with are also making vaccination mandatory or quasi-mandatory, and they're putting so many restrictions around it, that vaccination will happen. So, the ecosystem in which we operate it, I think, will insulate itself.

You had alluded in the past about getting into consulting. Will this increase your margins?
<\/strong>
There is nothing in history that says consulting is a highly profitable industry. Everybody seems to think that somehow this is a high value add. It is not from a margin perspective, but from making sure that our relevance to the customer keeps increasing. Today, we have 50 plus customers with whom we make more than $100 million revenue, yet strategic customers. It is important that we try to address as many of their needs as possible. We have to keep on reinventing ourselves, keep on staying with where their current set of problems are. If we do that, and as we increase wallet share with the customer, that automatically will come into profitability… it is strategically important for us to keep on increasing our revenue and also be margin accretive.

In the last several quarters, the growth rate of Infosys has picked up. Is that something you keep an eye on or worries you?
<\/strong>
It is a market-facing metric that we keep a watch on but not something that worries us. It is good competition that has benefited both of us. It also helps us stay on our toes... So, for us, we have had sustained growth, we have not had any major hiccups. We have the scale, and the question is, what is the next boundary to push through? This growth and transmission boundary is an important barrier to push through and not to take an easy task of trying to buy something and bolt it on, but to be able to do this transformation internally, that is a big boundary to get through. If we do that, the addressable market changes manifold. We have been benefiting from a big theme which will continue for many years, which is that technology components in every industry are increasing. So, automatically the technology budget of every industry increases but as we have seen with some of our larger competitors, we are currently selling into a single point inside the enterprise, by being able to expand beyond that, we can unlock a lot more of it. It will also make us more resilient, because if for whatever reason, there is a hiccup on this path, having a broader portfolio and a broader customer relationship will make us more resilient.

The rise in market capitalisation should be really satisfying to the extent that it is a validation of your model…
<\/strong>
At various points in time, the market has doubted us - whether we will adapt to different shifts in technologies. Every time that myth has been broken, you have seen this movement on the markets. When automation came, there was a lot of coverage that automation is going to be the death knell of the industry. When digital came, (commentators said) digital is going to wipe us out. So, each time you're able to demonstrate that, you know we are resilient and not just resilient, we can ride the wave rather than get disrupted...

Would you look at significant acquisitions?
<\/strong>
It is a question of what is significant. It is not that we're not been acquisitive in the past. We have expanded in markets such as Europe and Latin America with acquisitions and joint ventures. In 2008, we acquired Citi’s back-office business for $ 500 million, when we were smaller, and the market was much smaller. Our consumer banking product came out of an acquisition of FNS in Australia. We have a good history of doing it. We are not as prolific…but the right asset has to come at the right price.

Do you look at a big overseas acquisition to significantly increase the size of the company?
<\/strong>
I don't see that because if you look at the available universe, there's nothing greatly attractive (for us). There was a point in our history when maybe that would have been an option. Today, a short answer to that is ‘unlikely’. You're more focused on market access to segments where we're not present, or capability access, and that we do on an ongoing basis. We have been priced off the market for some time. We're just too conservative for today's market. So, our market cap might be high, but when it comes to paying out cash, we're conservative. We like to play like (Rahul) Dravid. By the time the innings goes through, the later half of the innings, everything starts coming together.

Are there any significant savings from work from home?
<\/strong>
Currently, we are not giving up any real estate. In the short term, it'll only be costlier as we need to rejig our offices to be open collaboration zones. In the new offices, we are trying to bring these principles. The real benefit comes by thinking of people as being one common talent cloud. Because of (our) work practices, we think of teams as being location dependent. You know, a Bangalore project versus a Mumbai project versus a Chennai project... So, we optimize projects based on location that has its own friction in a company like ours. If you consider talent as a common pool, then the leverage of the talent becomes significantly higher. You can start off projects faster. In the model that we're thinking of, you will actually know it will get flipped for travel, because we'll have to win the collaboration itself and we'll be flying people in and will be paying for the hotels.

If somebody had told you that you will be able to function relatively normally with over 90% of the workforce not in office, would you have imagined that was possible? How did you pull it off?
<\/strong>
Absolutely not. In January 2020, if anybody had said that, come March, you're going to shut down the whole work environment, and we're going to shift remote, both the fact that it can be done, as well as more importantly, the speed at which it got done, I think it was beyond anything that we thought of. We never thought of a risk scenario like that. We model various scenarios. We model a city outage.

But almost 100% of our capacity in India going off and then the distributed capacity globally, I never imagined it. I don't think any organization would have thought that that transition could have been made as seamlessly as it actually happened. But when you look back, multiple things had been going on in the background, which all came together to help. We have been investing in digital collaboration tool sets for a long time.

We had shifted to agile as a means of a primary methodology and using agile principles in almost all of our projects. What agile does is it's a high touch work environment, where it lends itself well to digital collaboration. But the customer trust was quite high, and almost 90% of our customers let us take the lead. What the pandemic did was it suddenly removed all the risk perception related to it because each of them has their own responses - should we do it, should we not? Is it worth it? Suddenly, the event changed the risk perception.

So, everything got a green flag, kind of a work forward approval, saying let's do it and then we will see what happens. That attitude shift was the biggest enabler. Once you started working, many of the fears turned out to be unfounded. That changed the approach and incrementally kept on tightening and modifying it.
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塔塔数字可能是未来的TCS, Rajesh Gopinathan说

塔塔咨询服务公司是专注于增长和转型,扩大收入从现有客户提供更多的服务,说首席执行官Rajesh Gopinathan独家采访。

拉克里希南 Ganguli Bodhisatva
  • 更新2021年9月6日上午07:35坚持
阅读: 100年行业专业人士
读者的形象读到100年行业专业人士
塔塔咨询服务公司(TCS)是专注于增长和转型,扩大收入从现有客户提供更多的服务,首席执行官Rajesh GopinathanGanguli告诉ET的拉克里希和Bodhisatva在一次采访中,他草拟的计划未来五年掌舵。摘录:

TCS有一个巨大的影响吗塔塔集团的市值。如何你的责任意识/负担吗?

一点儿也没有呢。它已经成立,我们几乎最大化我们的业务运行。这个DNA得到传播,因为DNA是非常强大的。我开始在集团层面,我知道20年前,别人把接力棒;还有其他公司一样大,不同……今天,轮到我们了。候鸟的类比是他们飞的领头雁。它是鸟的物理在为下一个创造电梯前面。随着时间的推移,不同的鸟类将前沿…这就是我们作为一个公司。 In any given portfolio, there will be one or two that are performing very well at any point, which will seed the performance of others. That's the natural progression. If you take a longer view, different companies have (taken the mantle within the塔塔组)。还有他们设法运行组合,扩大它。今天,是发生在数字的播种,也许20年后,他们会将成为领袖的人。

广告
从逻辑上讲,它只能是两件事。但它可以是像你说的,数字业务?

或(塔塔资本)金融服务。

金融服务可以另一种可能性,还是有一些大动作到可再生能源?

我觉得在印度制药公司开发。Covid-19大流行已经表明,在本地可以解决当地问题,这意味着市场是敞开的。制药公司又是一个主要地区,我不认为我们做正义的公司目前正在那里。

你的鸟类比的问题是,很难看到其他公司可以匹配TCS…

当我加入在1990年代,塔塔钢铁和电信(塔塔汽车(Tata Motors)现在)是领先的。谁能想到,这将是现在TCS ?所以,我看到别人有同样的地位。

什么角色是TCS在塔塔集团的数字倡议?

我们内部有一个可信的角色,但从我们的开发和技术合作伙伴的角度来看,他们也越来越自给自足,尤其是新收购的。现在他们更独立。在早期,我们是一个大的合作伙伴。

今年2月,你将完成5年的首席执行官。你已经找到了你打算做什么?

这五年来一直在过山车(骑)。第一年都是确保我们稳定内部以及管理观念。我们的很多时间只是确保我们见面的客户,给他们信心,一切都没有变化。这只是一个领导变化成为接管从N•钱德拉塞卡兰主席塔塔的儿子)。然后最后一年/两年半一直这(流行)。我们也设法保持移动。的一个原因是,我们已经建立在我们一直做什么(长时间)。虽然这对我来说是一个巨大的变化和NG苏(首席运营官),大部分的团队是恒定的。他们的工作是恒定的。通过保持战略联系紧密,他们一直在做什么,然后它向前移动,破坏最小化于零的水平。 On the business side, we are increasing the focus on the non-CIO organization, staying very grounded about who we are, but attacking the adjacencies so that we rebalance our portfolio.

广告
疫苗云生,你什么时候能看到人们在大量回到办公室吗?你有去年25/25视力的…

25/25模型的目的是为了得到反馈来自客户和内部利益相关者。的反馈是非常积极的。我们现在只有不到5%(员工)在办公室。我们希望对日历年底或明年初,我们将回到办公室的70 - 80%。第一个目标将是50%的人(从办公室),其余(远程)。重要的是,我们不打算隔离员工在家工作和在办公室工作。每个人都必须进入办公室在一段时间内,可以在家工作的灵活性。

会担心如果Covid-19波加速在美国?

我们的期望是,它更像是一个打嗝而不是一个主要的清单,因为它不太可能会导致其他人的医疗恐慌。大多数的公司与我们合作也在接种疫苗强制或quasi-mandatory,他们把那么多限制,疫苗接种将发生。我们经营的生态系统,我认为,将自我隔离。

你有提到在过去进入咨询。这将会增加你的利润吗?

历史上没有说,咨询是一个高利润的行业。每个人都似乎认为在某种程度上这是一个高价值的增加。它不是从利润的角度来看,而是从确保我们与客户不断增加。今天,我们有50 +客户与我们超过1亿美元的收入,但战略客户。很重要的是,我们试图解决尽可能多的他们的需要。我们必须继续改造自己,继续住在他们当前的问题在哪里。如果我们这样做,我们与客户钱包份额增加,自动将进入盈利能力…对我们来说是具有重要战略意义的继续增加我们的收入和利润率粘连的。

在过去的几个季度,印孚瑟斯的增长率了。是你关注或担心吗?

这是一个评估的指标,我们保持关注但不是担心我们。是件好事,使我们两国的竞争。它还帮助我们保持我们的脚趾…所以,对我们来说,我们有持续增长,我们没有任何重大问题。我们有规模,问题是,下一个边界通过是什么?这种增长和传播推动边界是一个重要的障碍,而不是采取一个简单的任务试图买东西和螺栓,但能够在内部转换,这是一个巨大的边界通过。如果我们这样做,潜在市场多方面的变化。我们一直受益于一个大主题,将持续多年,即技术组件在每个行业正在增加。因此,自动每个行业的技术预算增加,但正如我们所看到的我们的一些更大的竞争对手,我们目前销售到单个企业内部,通过扩大除此之外,我们可以解锁更多。它也会使我们更有弹性,因为如果不管出于什么原因,有一个打嗝这条道路上,有一个更广泛的投资组合和更广泛的客户关系会让我们更有弹性。

市值的增加应该很满意的程度,它是一个模型的验证…

各个时间点,市场怀疑我们——我们是否会适应不同的转移技术。每一次神话被打破,你在市场上看到了这个运动。自动化来的时候,有很多报道,自动化行业的丧钟。数字来的时候,(评论员说)数字会消灭我们。所以,每次你可以证明,你知道我们不仅是弹性和弹性,我们可以骑波而不是中断……

你会看重大收购?

这是一个问题,什么是重要的。这并不是说我们没有贪婪的过去。我们已经扩大了在欧洲和拉丁美洲等市场收购和合资企业。在2008年,我们以5亿美元的价格收购了花旗的后台业务,当我们小的时候,和市场要小得多。我们的消费金融产品的收购fn在澳大利亚。我们有一个很好的做它的历史。我们不是多产的…但正确的资产必须以合适的价格。

你看一个大型海外收购显著增加的大小公司吗?

我没有看到,因为如果你看看可用的宇宙,没有什么极大的吸引力(为我们)。曾经有我们历史上的一个点,或许这是一个选择。今天,一个简短的回答是“不可能”。你更关注市场准入领域,我们不存在,或能力访问,我们做一个正在进行的基础。价格我们已经退出市场一段时间。我们只是太保守今天的市场。所以,我们的市值可能很高,但当涉及到支付现金,我们保守。我们喜欢玩喜欢Dravid(拉胡尔)。局经过的时候,后半局,一切都开始聚在一起。

有大笔存款从在家工作吗?

目前,我们没有放弃任何房地产。在短期内,这只会是昂贵的,我们需要调整我们的办公室开放协作区域。在新的办公室,我们正在努力把这些原则。真正的好处是通过思考的人是一个常见的人才云。因为(我们的)工作的实践,我们认为团队是位置相关的。你知道,班加罗尔和孟买项目和钦奈项目……所以,我们基于位置的优化项目,像我们这样的公司有自己的摩擦。如果你考虑人才作为公共池,那么人才变得更高的杠杆。你可以开始项目更快。在模型中,我们考虑,你就会知道它会翻旅游,因为我们必须赢得合作本身和我们将飞行和将支付酒店。

如果有人告诉你,你将能够功能相对正常,超过90%的员工不在办公室,你能想象这是可能吗?你是怎么做到的呢?

绝对不是。2020年1月,如果有人说,3月份,你会关闭整个的工作环境,我们将远程转变,这两个事实,这是可以做到的,同时更重要的是,它的速度完成了,我认为这是超越任何我们认为的。我们从未想过这样的风险的情况下。我们模型的各种场景。我们城市故障模型。

但几乎100%的容量在印度去然后分布式能力在全球范围内,我从未想过它。我不认为任何一个组织会想到无缝过渡可能已经实际发生。但当你回头看时,在后台多个事情已经发生了,一起来帮助。我们已经投资数字协作工具集很长一段时间。

我们已经转移到敏捷的主要方法和在几乎所有项目使用敏捷原则。敏捷是高接触的工作环境,它非常适用于数字协作。但客户信任是相当高,几乎90%的我们的客户让我们带头。大流行所做的是它突然删除了所有相关的风险感知它,因为他们每个人都有自己的反应,我们应该这样做,我们应该不是吗?值得吗?突然,事件改变了感知风险。

所以,一切都有一个绿旗,一种工作提出批准,说让我们做,然后我们将看看会发生什么。这种态度转变的最大推动者。一旦你开始工作,许多的担忧是毫无根据的。改变了方法和增量继续收紧和修改它。
  • 发布于2021年9月6日07:34点坚持

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Tata Consultancy Services<\/a> (TCS<\/a>) is focusing on growth and transformation to expand revenue from existing clients by offering them more services, chief executive Rajesh Gopinathan<\/a> told ET's Raghu Krishnan and Bodhisatva Ganguli in an interview, as he draws up a plan for the next five years at the helm. Excerpts:

TCS<\/a> has an outsize influence on the Tata<\/a> group in terms of market capitalisation. How conscious are you of that responsibility\/burden?
<\/strong>
None whatsoever. The way it has been set up, we pretty much run to maximize our business. It's a DNA that gets transmitted because the DNA is very strong. I started at the group level, and I know that 20 years back, other people carried the baton; there were other companies that were as large and as diverse... Today, it is our turn. The analogy is of migratory birds as they fly in a V-formation. The physics of it is that the bird in front creates lift for the next one. Over time, different birds will take up the forward position... That's how we are as a company. In any given portfolio, there will be one or two that are performing very well at any point, which will seed the performance of others. That's the natural progression. If you take a longer view, different companies have (taken the mantle within the
Tata<\/a> group). And still they've managed to run the portfolio and expand it. Today, the seeding that is happening on digital, maybe 20 years later, they will be the ones who will be the leaders.

Logically, it can only be two things. But it could be either that as you said, the digital business?
<\/strong>
Or (Tata Capital) financial services.

Financial services can be the other possibility, or is there some big movement into renewable energy?
<\/strong>
I feel pharma is under-exploited in India. The Covid-19 pandemic has shown that local problems can be solved locally, which means the market is wide open. Pharma is again a major area, and I don't think we have done justice to the companies that are currently there.

The issue with your bird analogy is that it is difficult to see how any other company can match TCS…
<\/strong>
When I joined in the 1990s, Tata Steel and Telco (Tata Motors now) were leading. Who would have thought that it would be TCS now? So, I have seen when others had the same position that we have.

What role is TCS playing in Tata group’s digital initiative?
<\/strong>
We have a trusted role internally, but from our development and technology partner perspective, they are also becoming more and more self-sufficient, especially with new acquisitions. Now they're more standalone. In the early days, we were a larger partner.

In February, you will complete five years as CEO. Have you achieved what you set out to do?
<\/strong>
These five years have been a roller coaster (ride). The first year was all about making sure that we stabilize both internally as well as manage perception. A lot of our time was spent just making sure that we met the customers and gave them the confidence that nothing had changed. This is just a leadership change (taking over from N Chandrasekaran, who became chairman of Tata Sons). Then the last year and a half\/ two years has been this (pandemic). We have also managed to keep things moving. One of the reasons is that we have built on what we have been doing (for long). While it was a big change for me and NG Subramaniam (chief operating officer), the bulk of the team was constant. Their work was constant. By keeping the strategy linked tightly to what they've been doing, and then moving it forward, the level of disruption was minimized to zero. On the business side, we are increasing the focus on the non-CIO organization, staying very grounded about who we are, but attacking the adjacencies so that we rebalance our portfolio.

With vaccinations gathering pace, when will you see people come back to office in large numbers? You had articulated the 25\/25 vision last year…
<\/strong>
The intent of the 25\/25 model was to get feedback from customers and from internal stakeholders. The feedback is very positive. We are right now less than 5% (of employees) in the office. We expect that towards the end of the calendar year or early next year, we will get back to 70-80% in the office. The first target will be to get to 50% of the people (from office) and the rest (remotely). The important point is that we do not intend to segregate our workforce into work from home and work from office. Everybody will have to come into office for a period of time and can have the flexibility to work from home.

Will it be a concern if the Covid-19 wave accelerates in the United States?
<\/strong>
Our expectation is that it's more of a hiccup rather than a major listing because it's unlikely that it will result in the kind of healthcare scare that the others had. Most of the companies that we work with are also making vaccination mandatory or quasi-mandatory, and they're putting so many restrictions around it, that vaccination will happen. So, the ecosystem in which we operate it, I think, will insulate itself.

You had alluded in the past about getting into consulting. Will this increase your margins?
<\/strong>
There is nothing in history that says consulting is a highly profitable industry. Everybody seems to think that somehow this is a high value add. It is not from a margin perspective, but from making sure that our relevance to the customer keeps increasing. Today, we have 50 plus customers with whom we make more than $100 million revenue, yet strategic customers. It is important that we try to address as many of their needs as possible. We have to keep on reinventing ourselves, keep on staying with where their current set of problems are. If we do that, and as we increase wallet share with the customer, that automatically will come into profitability… it is strategically important for us to keep on increasing our revenue and also be margin accretive.

In the last several quarters, the growth rate of Infosys has picked up. Is that something you keep an eye on or worries you?
<\/strong>
It is a market-facing metric that we keep a watch on but not something that worries us. It is good competition that has benefited both of us. It also helps us stay on our toes... So, for us, we have had sustained growth, we have not had any major hiccups. We have the scale, and the question is, what is the next boundary to push through? This growth and transmission boundary is an important barrier to push through and not to take an easy task of trying to buy something and bolt it on, but to be able to do this transformation internally, that is a big boundary to get through. If we do that, the addressable market changes manifold. We have been benefiting from a big theme which will continue for many years, which is that technology components in every industry are increasing. So, automatically the technology budget of every industry increases but as we have seen with some of our larger competitors, we are currently selling into a single point inside the enterprise, by being able to expand beyond that, we can unlock a lot more of it. It will also make us more resilient, because if for whatever reason, there is a hiccup on this path, having a broader portfolio and a broader customer relationship will make us more resilient.

The rise in market capitalisation should be really satisfying to the extent that it is a validation of your model…
<\/strong>
At various points in time, the market has doubted us - whether we will adapt to different shifts in technologies. Every time that myth has been broken, you have seen this movement on the markets. When automation came, there was a lot of coverage that automation is going to be the death knell of the industry. When digital came, (commentators said) digital is going to wipe us out. So, each time you're able to demonstrate that, you know we are resilient and not just resilient, we can ride the wave rather than get disrupted...

Would you look at significant acquisitions?
<\/strong>
It is a question of what is significant. It is not that we're not been acquisitive in the past. We have expanded in markets such as Europe and Latin America with acquisitions and joint ventures. In 2008, we acquired Citi’s back-office business for $ 500 million, when we were smaller, and the market was much smaller. Our consumer banking product came out of an acquisition of FNS in Australia. We have a good history of doing it. We are not as prolific…but the right asset has to come at the right price.

Do you look at a big overseas acquisition to significantly increase the size of the company?
<\/strong>
I don't see that because if you look at the available universe, there's nothing greatly attractive (for us). There was a point in our history when maybe that would have been an option. Today, a short answer to that is ‘unlikely’. You're more focused on market access to segments where we're not present, or capability access, and that we do on an ongoing basis. We have been priced off the market for some time. We're just too conservative for today's market. So, our market cap might be high, but when it comes to paying out cash, we're conservative. We like to play like (Rahul) Dravid. By the time the innings goes through, the later half of the innings, everything starts coming together.

Are there any significant savings from work from home?
<\/strong>
Currently, we are not giving up any real estate. In the short term, it'll only be costlier as we need to rejig our offices to be open collaboration zones. In the new offices, we are trying to bring these principles. The real benefit comes by thinking of people as being one common talent cloud. Because of (our) work practices, we think of teams as being location dependent. You know, a Bangalore project versus a Mumbai project versus a Chennai project... So, we optimize projects based on location that has its own friction in a company like ours. If you consider talent as a common pool, then the leverage of the talent becomes significantly higher. You can start off projects faster. In the model that we're thinking of, you will actually know it will get flipped for travel, because we'll have to win the collaboration itself and we'll be flying people in and will be paying for the hotels.

If somebody had told you that you will be able to function relatively normally with over 90% of the workforce not in office, would you have imagined that was possible? How did you pull it off?
<\/strong>
Absolutely not. In January 2020, if anybody had said that, come March, you're going to shut down the whole work environment, and we're going to shift remote, both the fact that it can be done, as well as more importantly, the speed at which it got done, I think it was beyond anything that we thought of. We never thought of a risk scenario like that. We model various scenarios. We model a city outage.

But almost 100% of our capacity in India going off and then the distributed capacity globally, I never imagined it. I don't think any organization would have thought that that transition could have been made as seamlessly as it actually happened. But when you look back, multiple things had been going on in the background, which all came together to help. We have been investing in digital collaboration tool sets for a long time.

We had shifted to agile as a means of a primary methodology and using agile principles in almost all of our projects. What agile does is it's a high touch work environment, where it lends itself well to digital collaboration. But the customer trust was quite high, and almost 90% of our customers let us take the lead. What the pandemic did was it suddenly removed all the risk perception related to it because each of them has their own responses - should we do it, should we not? Is it worth it? Suddenly, the event changed the risk perception.

So, everything got a green flag, kind of a work forward approval, saying let's do it and then we will see what happens. That attitude shift was the biggest enabler. Once you started working, many of the fears turned out to be unfounded. That changed the approach and incrementally kept on tightening and modifying it.
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