In 2012, when Sunil Manglore joined CA Technologies as Managing Director of the Nasdaq-listed company’s India arm, the software firm had its focus largely on government business.

Over the past four years, Manglore — an industry veteran with more than 20 years of experience — was instrumental in the diversification into financial services and large private enterprises. In a tete-a-tete with BusinessLine , Manglore, who is the Managing Director at CA Technologies India, says the company is banking on cloud technologies, while the recent acquisition of continuous application performance-testing solution, BlazeMeter, would complement its India portfolio. Excerpts:

Software is becoming the core for Indian corporates, much like the shift happening elsewhere in the world. Was software an enabler for many firms earlier?

In the past, IT and software were more of productivity tools that supported functions like sales, production, finance and marketing. However, in today’s times, IT is at the front and centre of the business. In many cases, software and IT is the business. Companies are using software and IT to connect directly to customers for transacting business directly and getting their feedback on a real-time basis.

Disruption driven by IT and software is happening across industries. And India is not far behind. In fact, many Indian companies are ahead of their competitors globally when it comes to adoption of technologies and using software for servicing customers, improving operational efficiencies, or creating new business models.

How will the acquisition of BlazeMeter help CA Technologies in India?

In today’s application economy, the performance of an application is an important determinant of customer experience. Codes need to be tested continuously to deliver high-quality applications at scale. BlazeMeter is a continuous performance testing solution that complements and completes our current DevOps portfolio. It helps democratise performance testing.

We see a huge market for this product with large and medium System Integrators, Internet native companies, financial services companies and back-offices of our global customers.

Upgrades by CA Technologies at CA World are mainly for mainframe. How important is mainframe computing in India?

From an Indian perspective, we at CA see mainframes as yet another computing resource.A majority of developers for mainframes globally are based in India; many of them with our large global customers or IT services companies who are our partners. Our mainframe solutions are relevant to this community.

Our mainframe solutions also focus on ease of use for the developer community, who are out of college and are not familiar with green screens.

In Asia, India is leading in digital transformation according to the CA- Coleman Parkes survey. What makes companies in the country top the chart?

In the survey, India had a business impact score for digital transformation of 79, which was the highest globally. The global average was 53. The survey drew a strong co-relation between adoption of digital technologies and business performance. These higher scores for Indian businesses are the result of lower IT adoption and maturity before businesses adopted digital transformation. This survey indicates the huge potential for business gains that adoption of IT can have.

The app economy is not going to be a gentle evolution, but how is it changing the way businesses are built and run?

In the old days, businesses were built to last. In these times, if organisations have to last, they have to be built-to-change.

Built-to-change companies don’t spend much time on competition. They understand their markets, find under-served white spaces and invent ways to serve their customers better.

They work relentlessly to remove friction from their customer experiences and are not tied to fixed assets. Built to change companies innovate and execute at breakneck speed. These built-to-change companies are asset-light, agile, customer-centric and have a high appetite for risk.

Today IT and software give companies the tools and processes to speed up their execution and sense and respond to the changes in the environment quickly and easily.

CA Technologies is betting big on cloud. How do you see it emerging in India?

Built-to-last companies become agile, not just in the way they develop software but by also realigning their work flows to increase the speed and efficiency of their outcomes. Low initial investments and short time to value, associated with cloud-based solutions, align with the agile mindset.

It is in this context that cloud-based technologies are seeing increasing adoption in the Indian market. In India, the infrastructure required to run cloud-based applications is also developing rapidly. A number of Managed Service providers are running profitable businesses by offering cloud-based services to enterprises .

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