Vishal Sikka, new CEO and MD of Infosys, wants the IT company to achieve greater heights during his tenure. In an interaction with BusinessLine , he shares his plans for the first few months in office.

Do you think that there could be issues about managing the company by working out of your US office?

I will be here once a month. We have 65 per cent of our business coming from the US, about 24 per cent coming from Europe and that is a vast, vast majority coming out of international operations. So, it does make sense to be there. Shibulal (former CEO) told me once that he is on the road seven weeks in a quarter. So, I believe this will work.

What are the first few things that you plan to do now that you have assumed office?

Will begin with the town hall meeting, then we have the $100-million fund that we have already talked about. We will go to Mysore where we have our training centre and where we will have new classes for our employees. We plan to launch new initiatives around new projects.

What do you plan to tell the employees during the town hall meeting?

That we will bring back confidence, we will address issues about huge attrition and how we plan to contain that. In the long-term, it is all about boosting confidence among employees and getting them inspired to do better work.

Next week, you will have your sales conference in Las Vegas, where over 2,500 employees are set to attend. What is the agenda for this conference?

We will try to pass on a message about how we plan to grow. The deal pipeline we have and how we plan to execute them and about new kinds of projects that we will look at. Beyond that, regional heads working on and thinking on new ideas. They will make their presentations, they will present their thoughts.

What will be your first message to clients?

To the existing clients, we will tell them that we will continue to work for them, and keep doing it better. In addition, do new kinds of things that are of strategic importance. That we want to demonstrate success and build on that success. Parallelly, we want to work with new kinds of clients. For example, for the retail clients, we want to give them the retail digital marketing experience or for the oil and gas clients, it will involve analysing massive geo-statistical and geographical seismic date to better understand where energy, gas and oil are. This has not been solved before. We want to do predictive maintenance for all kinds of manufacturing companies. We want to work more in the area of data analytics and start projects for the clients in that area and there go for high value and high margin.

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