We need a more all-hands-meet approach in today’s IT world: TCS COO

TCS COO

N

Ganapathy Subramaniam

– NGS to most who know him well – is Tata Sons chairman N Chandrasekaran’s older brother. He was executive vice president and head of financial solutions when Chandrasekaran was TCS CEO and was elevated to COO when Chandrasekaran moved to head Tata Sons. He describes his brother as “a man in a hurry”. “I meet Chandra as often I did… I hardly got to meet him earlier too. We meet at family gatherings, exchange WhatsApp messages occasionally, or even get on to an early morning call,” he says. In an interview with TOI, Subramaniam talks about his new role at the $16.5 billion company. Excerpts:

How do you see your role as COO?

The industry is changing and it’s just that the pace of change in the past two to three years is faster than what it was previously. The adoption of cloud, digital, artificial intelligence, gives us greater opportunity to do things with alacrity and agility. This means we need to adopt a more all-hands-meet approach. I have spent about 35 years in the industry, seen some heads of practices who have all grown up to manage billions of dollars of businesses. They are leaders in their business and the best I can do is not to interfere and let them do what they are doing. The problems that they do not want to handle, they can give it to me and I can help them – these can include leveraging some customer relationships and strategic pursuits.

What are the challenges in driving a two-speed organization – the older ADM (application development & maintenance) one and the newer digital one?

I don’t know whether to call it as running two different speeds. I want to add a cylinder to a running car. Even now, we have projects running on Cobol and we continue to be dedicated to those technologies. Sometimes you have to run a marathon and at times, you have to do a sprint, but sometimes both. We need to be agile and nimble to tap market opportunities because if one is delayed by a day, a deal is gone. By working with customers, our client partners or sales people have built up huge contextual knowledge which is phenomenal. The important thing is to take the knowledge and apply in the solution to create a value proposition.

TCS set an ambitious target of touching $5 billion in digital revenue by 2020. Where are you on that journey?

Digital is interpreted in different ways by companies. The real thing is the ability to reimagine a customer’s process. You have to create an ecosystem in the market place for digital. Our digital journey is to create APIs, services, micro services and see how one can unlock contextual knowledge in the system and enable the organisation to participate in the system. There are a few organisations in Europe, USA and Australia where we facilitated them to be part of market places by creating value and removing inefficiencies in their value chain.

Are you willing to cannibalise your traditional business for the sake of the newer digital businesses?
That’s the rule of the game. Digital has greater potential to deliver value—for instance, if it took me one year to do it, I will do it in one quarter. Time to market, quality and price have been the drivers of the IT industry. There is so much headroom for growth.

You have a large exposure to banking and financial services. It’s been tough going for that vertical. Is the worst behind you?

We are growing and when we spoke to customers, they’ve indicated spends to be same as last year if not better. The client’s planning horizon has moved to a quarter. There is a certain amount of external events that happens and they will calibrate it accordingly.