Growth will come from all markets: N Chandrasekaran, CEO & MD, TCS

Where will growth in the next decade come from?

For Indian IT, growth will come from all the markets. Even from the US where we are now close to a billion dollars a quarter. Four billion dollars is a big number but considering the size of the US market, it is still small. We need to see how to accelerate this growth. So, the US will definitely grow. Then there’s a huge opportunity in Asia-Pacific . While we are quite large and have a strong footprint, most of our revenues come from the big countries like Australia and Singapore.

There are lot of other countries where there are opportunities, especially in Japan and China. Building business in China is going to take longer because of language issues and because we have to learn how to work in that market . It is a very competitive market and today, we are very-solution oriented and focus only on financial services. But as we move into the future, we will have to expand our footprint of services.

In Japan, there are lots of large companies but we’re doing projects which are one-off : we do not have a sustained relationship. You need to understand what delivery model works. Just replicating what you have in the West won’t work.

And in terms of technologies?

There will be a lot of technologies that will drive growth. I think cloud will be a very important technology and from a front-end point of view, mobility is going to be extremely important. When I say mobility, I don’t mean only mobile devices. I also mean that the power of information in back-end systems will be used very effectively in mobile devices for decision-making . It could be iPAd, Google’s device and Blackberry . But the business user will have a lot of access to data in his front-end device. So, mobility, cloud and predictive analytics, which is real-time analytics , which is so critical.

Analytics will happen real-time and it will make a huge difference to companies by providing insights about customers. These and social computing, which will definitely make an impact. It remains to be seen what kind of impact but that will also come into the enterprise world.

So, there is a convergence of technologies which are very successful in the consumer domain to the enterprise domain. Because you are used to very sophisticated technologies as an individual but you go to your enterprises you are using systems that are not as user friendly.

How successful has Indian IT been in moving up the value chain?

The change has been very significant. No question about it. For example, today if you look at the number of deals we sign, they are full services deals. And the deals we’ve announced, a good number of them are full-services deals. If you take domain content, we’re completely an industry-based organisation, and we offer solutions. There are many engagements that we do from a business case implementation point of view. There’s a huge difference between 2003 and now, 2004 and now, and even between 2006 and now.