SD Shibulal has played many parts at Infosys. He was the company?s first sales person and bagged its first direct client in the mid-1980s. He has been in extremely technical, managerial and delivery-oriented roles. As the COO, he spearheaded the company?s largest restructuring bid in 30 years. Now, he would have an even more important part to play as the firm?s CEO?he takes over this August. In an interview with Goutam Das, Shibulal shares his thoughts on the journey ahead.
Do you think a 50-plus CEO or Chairman can connect to the bottom of the pyramid employee who is 20-something in the current times? Your employee bulge is at the bottom.
My view is that people do not connect based on age; they connect based on your leadership style, value system, empathy, how well you lead by example, and what is the value they are deriving from the organisation. I also believe that the point of presence for an employee is the manager, not the CEO. As long as we can provide the employees with an opportunity to build their capabilities and career, plus provide autonomy and purpose, they would connect. An Infosys visiting card is well respected in the society.
Infosys has been restructuring to look and feel more like a global system integrator. As the CEO, where do you want to see the company in a few years?
We have created the global delivery model (GDM) philosophy that fundamentally disrupted the service delivery model. This had happened in manufacturing some 30 years ago?manufacturing started getting disintegrated. GDM became the de facto standard for delivering services. However, value creation is a continuous process. This is applicable to both India and global system integrators (SIs). That is where the journey of convergence started, probably 10-15 years ago. Global SIs have adapted the global delivery model, have built their offshore capabilities or are in the process of building them. Indian SIs, in turn, are trying to build or integrate the global SI model into their system. Infosys is on a journey of trying to become an enterprise-class global system integration and consulting firm.
If you want to be a true strategic partner to a client, you need end-to-end capability, you need to play both in the boardroom and in the backroom, you need to have very strong relationships with clients. We started the journey 10 years ago. We started out with Infosys Internet Consulting in 1997. That was the first time that consulting emerged in our vocabulary. It was more of technology consulting. Then we started doing business consulting. We clearly believe that the strategies we have adopted will put us ahead of almost anyone in the journey.
In a re-set world, is it possible to continue the revenue momentum the company has seen in the past decade?
It is important to understand our aspirations. That is what we work towards. Our first aspiration is to become an enterprise-class global SI. Our next aspiration is to grow above the industry average and have leading margins. Then everything else is about clients. We have an aspiration that we will grow our business transformation business ahead of others. That is why there has been a realignment of portfolios to create go-to-market verticals. One area in which we are expecting to grow faster than the Infosys average is in the business innovation space.
Infosys?s acquisitions, thus far, have mostly been for competency. Are you comfortable with this strategy or could you look for scale in the future?
Our focus has shifted to the business innovation space. McCamish was in that space. If you look at the last five years, our focus has been more on building competency in the business transformation space, not in the business operations space. In a way, the priority of capability acquisition has come down because we have built capability. Today, we have 3,000-4,000 consultants at various levels. We would be looking at IP-based companies, platforms and accelerators.
In other industries, mid-tier players are ramping up fast. However, in the IT industry, the larger companies have been growing faster than the smaller ones. Why this divergence?
It is a reflection of the complexity and criticality of the work. If you look at the business transformation work, it is quite complex. You are trying to re-write the supply chain for a corporation. That is a complex process panning multiple departments, multiple countries and multiple partners. If you look at the business operations side, you are trying to close books for a company. Also look at what happens with Finacle (Infosys?s core banking product). A Finacle implementation for a bank is like a heart replacement. The complexity of the work has only gone up over the years. Clients look for partners who are extremely stable financially, can be trusted, can scale if needed and also somebody who is global.