'Our aim is to achieve something audacious'

MUMBAI: The Indian software industry seems to have hit an air pocket. The Obama administration has been consistently drumming up the spectre of curbing outsourcing to India by American companies and has also been vocal about its efforts to offer tax breaks to companies that will create jobs in the US.
IT industry analysts have been voicing concern about the snail's pace at which the sector has been growing lately.However, none of the noise seems to have breached the heritage structure that houses Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India's largest software company. Inside the tastefully done up glass and wood modern office, it is business as usual. In a spacious cabin overlooking the historic Azad Maidan, a smile is always playing on the lips of company CEO & MD N Chandrasekaran, 46, who downplays the so-called threats faced by the IT industry as he aims to "achieve something audacious".
"If you look at the world business, the business models will keep changing, but the opportunities will remain. The reason I say this is because technology as a main ingredient for businesses is still on. For everything, technology is very critical. So, the tech spread will be high, it is increasing and technology, tools and services will keep evolving," he says in a matter-of-fact tone. "As long as you are strong enough to capture, adapt and evolve with the new business models, I think there is enough opportunity," he adds nonchalantly.
He should know. For a man who joined TCS straight out of the Regional Engineering College, Trichy, in 1986 and never "thought about leaving the company", he has seen the IT industry growing by leaps in the last two decades.
During that period, both Chandra and TCS have grown in rank and size, respectively. From a software programmer at TCS, Chandra is now its MD & CEO. And TCS is a $6 billion-plus IT firm compared to its revenues of $160 million in 1996-97. Or consider this: TCS recently said that it plans to recruit 30,000 in the next fiscal. These are numbers that the top management casually talks about these days. This was not the case when Chandra, as he is known among his colleagues, joined the industry several years ago.
The numbers were unthinkable at that time when very few people in the country actually understood the software business. "Yes, we were a small company at that time, but when compared with other companies we were still a large player then. However, now when you look at it, yes, we were very small."
As for his journey (and in a sense TCS's too) from Maker Towers to the current headquarters, he says he never had a dull day in office. "If you look at those days also, we used to take some tough projects. Some I got to work on, some I got to see from the sidelines. The culture of accommodation, building tools, taking technically challenging projects was there. I think we never said no to training and money was always spent on training," he says.
"The culture was there then and the culture is there today. So you can say [during] the foundation period, TCS build credibility, established itself in the market place [proving] that India can do it, built confidence in the system, in the company that you can take on big projects. You need to build the right people. Then you can scale [up]. I think in the last 10 to 12 years we have done that," he adds.
TCS business model, too, has changed over time. It has developed domain expertise in several areas. For instance, TCS created software capabilities in the infrastructure space and was arguably the first to get into the segment in 2000. Then it transformed itself into a globally networked outfit as it moved closer to where its foreign customers were based. "So now if you really look at the future, service-based models will come," he said.