ET Now: Unlike what I have been saying for six quarters in a row where TCS has surprised and delighted everybody with volume growth. This time around markets are not celebrating. While markets are not unhappy, they are not celebrating what TCS has reported for the quarter gone by.
Rajesh Gopinathan: This quarter has been, as I said balanced quarter, balanced between the health crisis, personal tragedies that many of our associates and loved ones went through and business opportunities and future optimism that we see. So, I believe that what you described is a valid summation of the 90 days gone by and we need to be pragmatic. We need to be watchful. We need to be diligent but we also are optimistic about the opportunities that we see and the fact that the long-term trends that we have identified and are investing, are continuing to gain in strength and we are staying focussed on them and shall continuously build on those strength areas in our core markets. So, it is a balanced quarter and I am not surprised by the kind of reaction that you described.
ET Now: So, if I keep the COVID impact and the drop in India business aside, can I say that the big picture scenario of new cloud architecture getting created and huge demand uptick coming. Has that big picture scenario also got challenged or what you have seen for the quarter gone by was more like a demand disruption in India business because of COVID?
The big picture scenario has got even further strengthened. If you look at the examples that we have shared in our press releases and analysts calls, there are many instances of how we are going beyond the infrastructure as a service promise of the cloud hyperscaler and using the common unifying fabric of the cloud to significantly bring about enterprise transmission. I will call out couple of examples. There are many more than what we have shared.
For example, for a leading franchise hospitality service provider typically to roll out transmission programme like this– let us say five years ago or ten years ago, it would have taken three years, five years, if you have a global franchise footprint. But, with the kind of fabric that the cloud allows, the ability to not just rollout a significant transmission but to keep it real time current and to continuously enhance their customer experience into it while maintaining security and stability is unprecedented.
Similarly, we shared an example of a very large industrial equipment and reagent manufacturer who got specialised in water treatment technologies, a fairly conservative company, deep engineering roots, very steep customer relationships, but once again the ability to significantly increase the agility of their business strategy rollout is what cloud promises and these are just couple of examples of what we are calling the horizon to promise of cloud and this is getting strengthened in industry after industry and our conviction is very strong that there is no stepping back from it.
ET Now: Covid is changing our thought process every day, have you changed your thought process on the work at home and the hybrid model?
Definitely, what started as you said as an immediate reaction, but has gained traction and gained acceptance across a fairly wide spectrum because they have seen both the resilience and the quality of the service delivery. So, SBWS is now widely accepted and has been also embraced and welcomed by many of our clients like yesterday NGS was mentioning- where they have shown interest in rolling that out into their own employee populations. But you have to remember two things; While the scale at which SBWS was deployed was phenomenal last year, it then appeared out of nowhere, it is an evolution of many investments and steps that we have been taking on this path over the last many years, including our investments in Agile and Location Independent Agile where we have significant thought leadership.
The other aspect is that the vision that we laid out of 25 by 25, we are also very confident about that vision but that vision needs to be executed and the path to execution will involve a return to office and a more structured disbursement back into this kind of a model because our current model was an immediate reaction to a crisis whereas the 25 by 25 vision is a much more deliberated, planned and staggered kind of a rollout of that vision. So, we will see the current SBWS operating model where we have about 97% of our people working remotely, we will swing the other way as this pandemic starts to lighten up and then we will go in a much more deliberate and controlled manner back to somewhere in that vision trajectory that we have laid out. This is the kind of evolution that we see of the working environment when we look forward into the next five years.
ET Now: If I say that look the quarter gone by was a blip, nothing changes for TCS in terms of the big picture and the demand scenario and what has happened is more like a forced factor, but if there is a third wave what happens then?
We are more than 50 years old company and we have every intention to keeping it going for the next 50 years so what happens in one quarter or the second quarter needs to be dealt with but the approach is to plan proactively and stay ahead of the game. Right now, we believe that the vaccinations while they might not be the 100% solution, but it is going to be the cornerstone of our approach to try to minimise the kind of loss that we suffered in human terms in the last 90 days and we are significantly pushing on the vaccination agenda.
As we have shared 70% of our associates have got at least one shot and we are driving it with the same level of execution focus that we bring to everything else and we intend to get 100% of our associates fully vaccinated by end of September. We believe that this is the best solution that is available at our hands. Beyond that whatever happens, we will deal with it as it comes around. We have a very strong team and we are continuously amazed by the passion and resilience that they have shown. Our HR teams who had to deal with both the human tragedy aspect of what unfolded as well a scenario where demand was very strong and the talent acquisition, retention, re-training continued and accelerated. So, in an environment like that–to be able to effectively operate, it is a testament to the kind of quality of people that we have and with that kind of a team in place, I am sure we are well positioned to deal with any challenges that come our way as we look forward.
