It has been more than a year since Anant Gupta took over as CEO from Vineet Nayar, a period during which the company continued to grow profitability, revenues, bagged large deals and entered into alliances with technology giants like CSC.

In an interview with Business Line , Gupta talks about the future of outsourcing, how the company is changing the perception of all IT outsourcers looking the same and areas of future investment. Edited excerpts:

Industry watchers say that all Indian outsourcers look sound and say the same things. Has HCL managed to break that perception?

If you look at the last two years, you would have seen a change in the way the top-5 IT exporters have performed. Different players have different approaches. We decided almost a decade back that IT infrastructure services would be a growth area for us and we decided to focus our energies in that direction. I think it has worked well for us but each company needs to look at their own approaches. The market often makes a mistake of looking it through a single lens. Strategies, hiring plans, career path of employees and customers don’t see it through a lens of companies with $20 billion or $5 billion. They look at depth of offerings. Different flavours, state of economies all factor in outsourcing.

Lot of companies bet on either getting technology deals that can impact the way they run their business or change their business. How do you weigh in that mix?

We give equal weightage to both. The fundamental reason being that these are not silos. Things you may invest in running the business can undergo changes over time.

For example, you may be running a certain business process, which gets automated. So, what do you do then? Ultimately, what technologies you may be using to run the business can also be used to change the business. Our application services business is 45 per cent, infrastructure business is 34 per cent and we look at these from both running and changing the business. Segment-wise financial services and manufacturing are strong and globally 60 per cent of IT spends and we have a good presence there.

Is the ideal mix?

It will change. If u look at what mix was in the last decade, what will look in the future it will change. Outsourcing as we know it in 2005 is no longer relevant. Being a little paranoid about business, new technologies and making investments, which may be ahead of its time are things that will work. Nokia is a classic example of how it missed out some new technology shifts. We have visibility of two years or so, beyond that it is impossible to make predictions.

So, what will be that one big thing that HCL is betting on?

Digital systems integration will be one big bucket that can be potentially large. You won’t have application management, IT infrastructure management, all that will go away. It will be IT management. The sharp divide of managing private data centres or monitoring software will all go away. With cloud computing, it is already disrupting the existing business cases as clients prefer to rent software rather than buy and maintain it.

Can you sustain the momentum considering that the economy in developed markets is not of the woods?

Pipeline-wise we are more bullish. I don't see ourselves accelerating our margin profile. We are already higher than what we should be when you factor in our business mix. The opportunity is large but we have to keep investments in some business areas. We will do that and invest in areas such as digital.

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