Infosys posted stellar Q3 earnings with profits up 6.6 per cent and a positive guidance of 12.8-13.2 per cent in constant currency terms, which helped lift the Sensex in an otherwise choppy trading day. Managing director and CEO Vishal Sikka told Bloomberg TV India that the company is eyeing start-ups in new areas – the reason why it invested in CloudEndure.

What has contributed to the stellar Q3 performance? Can it be sustained in the coming quarters?

Performance in any one particular quarter is dependent on lot of different factors and the result of work that we have done in past in many ways. And of course, the new business helps. But to a large degree, it is the result of what has already happened. We have lots of new deals, volume growth of 3.1 per cent and our innovation is kicking in — both grassroots innovation as well as the new offering in AiKiDo services, artificial intelligence and design thinking. The combination of all of that is giving us near-term confidence. But of course, the real impact that these will have is on a longer term. So, we are comfortable with our statement of the past that in fiscal 2017 (April-March), we expect to achieve industry-beating growth and the aspiration we have set of $20 billion by 2020. All of these are things that have started to kick in based on the outlook that we have set. I understand when people ask me about the macro-economic environment and things like that. But based on what we see, I feel comfortable with where we are. So we are upping our guidance at constant currency, which used to be 10-12 per cent, we are hoping it to be 12.8-13.2 per cent.

What is happening in the top line? Is the softness that you have seen this quarter just a one-off thing?

If you look at our top-5 or top-10 or top-25 clients, they have all grown for the first three quarters of this year faster than the company. So, we are happy with that performance. What we saw in some of the top-10 clients in the last quarter was that there was some decline primarily because of the seasonality, in manufacturing, less working days and things like that. We have a couple of top clients in Australia where there was a currency impact. In fact, there has been growth all around. Our relationship with our top clients had never been stronger and never more strategic.

What has been the performance of many of your new initiatives?

I am very proud that our clients have given us lots of testimonials. ABN Amro Bank has talked to us about how both zero distance and design thinking helped them tremendously. Similarly, DNB Bank has actually spoken about that.

TNT has talked about design thinking. We are extremely happy with what those clients are saying about all of these initiatives publically. I used to be surprised that we do not get more client testimonials. That was somehow never the case as you talked about the bank in America, insurance companies in Europe and more. But never with the names, and never with people. But this is something that we should all be proud of and celebrate.

Talking about the other pet project of yours — the start-ups — and also your latest association with OpenAI; you have already made quite a few acquisitions in the last 6-7 months or so. Are you looking to have deeper companies as part of Infosys?

Of course, we are always excited about that. The start-ups are the new children of our industry and you always want to see where the start-up world is heading and you all want to acquire new technology. So our strategy towards start-up is slightly different than the strategy towards acquisition. In acquisition, you want to acquire a company that has some degree of mass. But I deeply believe that life is too short to acquire yesterday’s technology. So we have been investing in start-ups in new areas and this last quarter we invested in CloudEndure, which is a security company for cloud and database troubles and disaster recovery.

We see examples of this happening everywhere. So we are excited about that and that is also an Israel-based company. We also invested in Boston-based startup WHOOP. Nicholas Negroponte, one of the teachers of my life, is an advisor to that company and they are doing really deep instrumentation of the human body and how it can help us measure what is going on with us. A lot of such start-ups are coming up and that is very exciting.

OpenAI is one of the technologies that can have a profound impact on humanity. We are very excited to be a part of this.

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