The Hindu Business Line : IT’s for all

We often underestimate the innovative prowess of the domestic players and have so far been looking for technological innovations from the West, rues Ajai Chowdhry, Chairman & CEO, HCL Infosystems. He is glad, however, that with the launch of innovative products such as the Tata Nano, the common perception is slowly but surely changing.

To the league of recent innovation closer home, Chowdhry likes to add the HCL MiLeap range of Leaptops. “With its ultra small form factor, offering mobile computing at an unbeaten price of Rs 13,990, MiLeap is set to create a new product segment in our country,” he mentions confidently, during the course of an e-mail interaction with eWorld.

“Other innovations in the past include products such as our sub-10K PC, which broke the price barriers in the market and set the industry trend of affordable computing among the desktop category,” says Chowdhry. “The computer that runs on a car battery, the four-in-one computer, the point-of -sale product and the ‘Data Centre’ in a box were all developed at our R&D centre.”

Excerpts from the interview.

Does attrition worry you more than the employability issue? Any antidotes?

Retention is becoming important in today’s corporate world, especially in the IT/ITES sector; quick shifts are a steady trend. With the increase in opportunities available in the IT industry, it is a challenge ’to Recruit the Best, Retain the Best and Reward the Best.’ When organisations fail to recruit and reward the best is when retention becomes a problem.

The strength of our training and development function has ensured that employability has never been a serious concern within HCL. We take pride in recruiting a large number of people from campus and grooming them into leaders, starting with a rigorous induction to enable continuous individual development.

Overall we have been successful in keeping attrition rates below industry averages, even as attrition has seen a sharp rise within the industry in the last few years.

What were the design challenges that you had to confront and overcome in making MiLeap possible?

MiLeap has been conceptualised as a product that will create a new category of product, namely ’the ultraportable that offers true Internet experience on the move’. The challenge was to offer PC functionality that gives a true Internet experience in such an efficient and compact form factor.

Next was to engineer a product that met the India-specific thermal, dust and durability requirements, as the product is meant to be used in a non-AC, non-dustproof environment.

One other challenge was to engineer it to offer connectivity on the move. And last but not the least challenge was to engineer a product that will hit the market at a price point of Rs 13,990. This affordable product sits between a laptop and a PDA, opening up immense new user possibilities to society.

Is information technology aggravating the inequalities within the country, or can it also work towards a more inclusive society?

In fact, IT is the next big equaliser in society after the last one, which is education. Today IT, more than anything else, is empowering the have-nots and is setting up the foundation on which a whole generation will empower themselves. Access to education and information, and distance learning are examples of how IT is benefiting society. Access to markets is transforming the lives of farmers and artisans.

Take, for example, the transparency and efficiency of the computerised railway ticket bookings, which have done away with an era of spending hours waiting in a queue just to get a ticket, getting caught in the clutches of middlemen; the worst exploited then were the poor.

While a lot has been achieved, there is a lot more that should be done. Adoption of IT will make society more inclusive.

Where do you see growth coming from, in the realm of IT products? And, in IT services?

The Indian information technology sector continues to be one of the sunshine sectors of the Indian economy. With a growth figure of 30.7 per cent in 2006-07, the sector has left its global counterpart, which grew at 10 per cent, way behind.

Its growth is dominated by IT software and services such as custom application development and maintenance (CADM), system integration, IT consulting, application management, infrastructure management services, software testing, service-oriented architecture and Web services.

What are the geographies and verticals that HCL is focusing on?

HCL has invested in an extensive nation-wide service and support network, which reaches even to remote corners of the nation. It has a strong direct support force of over 5,000+ members operational at 1,200+ locations across the country.

This addresses the issue of physical presence in a majority of towns and cities over and above its state-of-art remote support capability.

Going forward, one of the important business verticals for HCL will be the system integration business. With convergence being the core of the 24x7 infrastructure that businesses and government are setting up, system integration will be a core focus area for the company.

Ajai Chowdhry has a bachelor’s degree in electronics and communication engineering, and attended the Executive Program at the School of Business Administration, University of Michigan, US. He was one of the six founder members of HCL, a company founded in 1976 and today a $4.7-billion global enterprise employing nearly 6,000 people. He took over the reins of HCL Infosystems, the flagship company of the group, as President and CEO in 1994, when the turnover was $89 million. He was appointed Chairman of HCL Infosystems in November 1999.
Chowdhry, credited with the setting up of HCL’s overseas operations starting with Singapore in 1980, has extensively covered South Asian markets, including Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Indonesia, and China. A believer in the manufacturing potential of India, he was part of the IT Hardware Task Force set up by the Prime Minister of India to give shape to the country’s IT strategy. He has been invited to Chair the Confederation of Indian Industry’s National Committee for IT, ITES & E-Commerce, where he is striving to boost the deployment of IT in Indian SMEs to increase their productivity and to make them globally competitive.

dmurali@thehindu.co.in

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