TCS will beat Nasscom's growth guidance: N Chandrasekaran

Last month, Tata Consultancy Services, India’s largest software services company, announced the launch of its Digital Software & Solutions Group business unit, as clients globally focus on organisational transformation to keep themselves aligned with emerging technologies. 

Chief Executive and Managing Director N Chandrasekaran, in an interview with Bibhu Ranjan Mishra and Surabhi Agarwal, talks about how the company is preparing itself to tap those opportunities.

Edited excerpts:

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What was the need to set up the digital business unit? 

In the next few years, digital is going to bring massive transformation. It (digital) is a combination of all the powerful technologies, and not only social media, mobility, big data, analytics and cloud.

These are giving opportunity to reimagine the way business is done. So, I think it is important to bring together our knowledge of technology, global best practices, methods, domain knowledge and knowledge of the customers. 

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Is the traditional information technology (IT) model slowly becoming irrelevant?

No model becomes irrelevant but, yes, every model changes. We can’t be doing the same thing. The customers are moving because the market as well as the technology is moving.

So, we have got to be a little ahead of the curve and try to engage with the clients, helping them reimagine their businesses. We have to engage ourselves with customers to be able to make their business digital and we are doing that now.

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Have you started offering digital services? Which sectors are you targeting initially?

Absolutely, we have started offering these.

It’s happening across segments but mostly we see higher traction for digitisation in sectors such as media, retail, manufacturing, financial services and high-tech industry.
In the next few years, we expect our incremental revenue from digital practice to be $3-5 billion a year.

Nasscom has forecast FY15 exports growth at 13-15 per cent. Will TCS beat that?

We will certainly come ahead of the Nasscom guidance.

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Some say Indian IT firms are not focusing on intellectual property creation and innovation. What is TCS doing?

We have been doing it for the past couple of years and want to step it up. Even in digital, we have got a lot of intellectual property.

We have collaboration centres on the West Coast (US), which is about digital re-imagination and customer collaboration; it has been there for two years. We have got several labs, people and workspace to promote innovation.

We have created centres of excellence in areas like user interface design, user experience, cyber security - all the things required to bring the solutions to the market. We have also created intellectual property in foundation software - the kind of software tools needed to develop agile solutions.