Mindtree sharpens its focus on India

Mindtree, the Bengaluru-based IT company, is strengthening its focus on India market, which is seeing lots of momentum in adoption of technology, according to its India Business Head Koushik Ramani.

Since April 2017, Mindtree started offering digital technology, system and engineering services and packaged solutions to India-headquartered companies. “We are small and building the business. I am treating ourselves as a start-up within company,” he told Business Line referring to the year-old business unit.

India as a market is not new to Mindtree, which developed architecture for Aadhaar — a 12-digit unique identity number issued to all Indian residents based on their biometric and demographic data — and supported till first one lakh enrolments happened.

For Mindtree, from 2012 to 2016 the focus was more on the US and Europe – two largest markets. However, with global market becoming competitive coupled with Indian government’s focus on digital technology and rapid adoption of technology by companies, domestic market has become more attractive in the last couple of years, he said.

Nasscom has pegged addressable market for IT in India to be around $80 billion by 2022. For Mindtree, revenue from India at present is around 2 per cent of company’s overall $800 million. “Aspiration in next 3-4 years, India should be 3-5 per cent of company’s revenue,” he said. From last April , Mindtree got 12 Indian companies as clients. The company hopes to keep doubling it year-on-year to meet the target by 2020, he said.

Hiring plan

For delivery of services to clients in India, Mindtree plans to use its Kalinga facility in Bhubaneswar as a potential low cost centre. Over 150 employees are dedicated for India business with plans to ramp up to around 500 by 2020, he said.

In last three to four few years, customers’ [technology] buying pattern in India had changed considerably. Instead of putting cost as a critical issue on decision making, clients are giving importance to value. Today, cost is important but clients first want to know what value they will get, and then come back to cost factor. Priorities between cost and value have changed places in the last few years, he said.

Indian companies do not hesitate to adopt cloud though they talked about security. These changes gave a confidence that India is changing. “We observed the market for nearly two years before taking an active plunge in April 2017,” he said.

Target segments

Adoption of technology is strong in four major segments – government, PSUs, private large enterprise and SMEs. Government is highest spender but sales cycle is longer while SMEs are too wide with nearly 6 lakh registered SMEs, he said.

The company’s focus is on large enterprises and top SMEs that will give a base of 5,000 customers. It is taking a partner-led approach and talking to companies such as Microsoft, SAP and Salesforce, to jointly implement solutions. Mindtree will value from its domain expertise, he said.

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