Abhishek Law

With increased automation, there is a shift in demand for various types of IT jobs, according to Siddhartha Chatterjee, CTO, Persistent Systems. During a recent visit here, Chatterjee spoke about the outlook for the IT industry in India, reskilling requirements and growth areas for the company. Excerpts:

How would you describe the outlook for the IT industry in India?

The outlook for the traditional IT outsourcing business, which most Indian firms are into, isn’t very good. The nature of work is changing — it’s not about body-shopping any more. Digital native companies can do a lot more work with a lot fewer people. But, if you look at the work that people are in digital transformation, the outlook is excellent. People are trying to go with data analytics, machine learning, AI and so on. We (Indians and Indian companies) are on the global stage.

I have not seen any letdown in demand (for new contracts, infrastructure upgrade, etc). There may be some uncertainty, though.

This means there will be a change in skillset requirements, too?

Yes. Continuous upskilling and reskilling is the name of the game. And, because the tooling is getting better, the more routine tasks are getting replaced. Call centre stuff will of course go to lower-cost economies. But no economy can be low-cost for ever. India was at one point a low-cost economy for IT, now it’s Phillipines. At some point the automation will get so good that you will not require people to do low-skill jobs.

Should companies not take up the responsibility of upskilling or reskilling employees?

I think partly each one of has to do it for ourselves. It is a lot easier to do that. If a person wants to reskill, it is not very difficult. Companies also provide opportunities. Whether these people will get back into the workforce or not completely depends on how much they are willing to push themselves.

In this context, what are the growth areas that Persistent is focussing on?

Apart from traditional areas and cloud, automation, security and digital transformations are some of the things that have taken front-of-mind with our customers. Security is critical when you are doing an Aadhaar-like deployment and solutions around that through machine learning. Another area is the government business in India, which involves dealing with multiple regional languages and processing them. This isn’t much of a sweet spot for other companies.

What is the vertical revenue break-up?

While BFSI will be a major contributor, the other big chunk would be healthcare and life sciences. Traditional business or ISV (independent software vendor) is another big segment. Telecom and government continue to be comparatively small. If you look at growth, then machine learning, AI and blockchain continue to move back and forth.

So far, blockchain is being associated with crypto currency. How do you explain its other usages?

In fact, we are staying away from the crypto currency side of things. The blockchain technology follows a concept of distributed ledger — it’s immutable, it stays and you leave a trail of transactions that are auditable.

Blockchain actually allows multiple parties to work together without requiring trusting one another; and this is what makes the technology interesting in international trade finance, supply chain, maintaining land records and title insurance, among others. We are just scratching the surface.

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