Product and platform business has great potential for the future: HCL Chief

The P&P business is in early stages, though it’s still a big business — $1.5 billion — delivering EBITDA of 45 per cent and 25 per cent EBIT. It’s a fairly complex business. There are a number of products, and each product is in a different life cycle of its journey. Some of them are being migrated to the cloud; consumption and charging models are changing. So we are not providing a view on what will happen next year. It is more long term.

We have a cloud data warehouse product called Avalanche. This is 10X faster than the comparable products on the market, and it is priced at one-fifth of their price. That’s a strong offering, and we are in the early phases. It has great potential in the future.

Similarly, in automation, we have a number of products which automate a lot of IT operations. We are launching Unica and Commerce on the cloud, that will be a big strategy. There are a number of products deployed with a lot of clients, but we think a better strategy will be to migrate them to the cloud, and we have a cloud native solution available for a number of products.

We are not looking to increase investments in R&D in FY23; they will remain at the same levels.

$20 million is the annual revenue we get in those client categories. The new TCV is a little more towards smaller deal sizes and a little less on the larger deal sizes. These are going to come from across the board: digital foundation, digital R&D services, engineering and cloud services. To grow at 12-14 per cent you need all the engines to fire.

Already, if you take quarterly numbers, attrition rates have started to come down. We think it will stabilise in the next 2-3 quarters. We expect to hire 35,000-40,000 freshers this year.

We already have 20,000 people in new vistas locations, and we may take it up to 25,000-30,000. We are also globally expanding into new vistas locations in other geographies, where we also have these skilling programmes.

We have several programmes internally. We have a number of skill cohorts wherein employees are trained in a set of closely related skills after identifying their cores and checking the skill cohort they belong to. We ensure that they also get trained in all the adjacent areas. We are constantly increasing our fresher hiring and trying to get them trained and gain the necessary competence to execute on programmes. That’s a big focus for us. Once they are deployed on a programme, we look at what will be the next ideal programme for them if there’s any skill gap with respect to the next assignment. We also have a lot of learning materials online.

We have a lot of presence across a number of colleges. We continue to hire from them. We also have some advanced programmes they do in their final year. Those freshers perform better than others who are completely new.  

Most freshers have basic level skills if they are taking certain relevant courses, then here they go through rigorous boot camps before being assigned programmes at HCL.

Segment wise, we will be looking to hire from cloud, digital engineering, applications and analytics. These are then breaks down to sub areas. In each sub-area, there are hundreds of skills, which we call skill cohorts.