MUMBAI:
Vishal Sikka, 47, took over as CEO of Infosys at a time when things looked dim for the once vaunted software company. It had gone through over two years of underperformance compared to some of its peers. Sikka's appointment was a surprise and a relief. Surprise because of his background in software products that was very different from the services space at Infosys. Relief because many wanted a fresh face at the helm. In the four months since Sikka's appointment, the Infosys stock has risen significantly. In an exclusive interview to TOI, Sikka says he feels a tremendous burden of expectation:What are your thoughts on the first four months at Infosys?
The atmosphere is electric. People are so excited, there is so much positive energy that has been built up — it's difficult to describe. Never seen anything like this. Yes, may be in the trip to Australia with (PM Narendra) Modi. But that was little different. I walk into these rooms and people go crazy. There's a tremendous burden of expectation.
How different is it from SAP?
I have to think more about this. But the propensity to change, the desire to improve is awesome in Infosys. Over the last year there was this turmoil, people leaving. I created a team to look at simplification of processes, to deal with problems people have. Everybody in the team was so genuinely passionate about simplifying things. I was very impressed. Our development centre (DC) in Chennai told me they would be the best embracer of artificial intelligence among DCs in Infosys. You don't normally find large companies embrace change this way.
What makes it so?
Part of it comes from our education, which is at the heart of Infosys. Our Mysore training campus is so awesome. We can train on such a massive scale — 16,000 trainees at a time for 23 weeks. Mr Murthy used to call it learnability. Education is in the mindset of employees, they are keen to learn.
What do you see as your big challenges?
One is that the company processes have not kept pace with its massive growth. Another is that we have to improve the confidence of the youngsters. This is true for all Indian IT companies. The consistent feedback from customers is that though Infosys is without comparison in quality and delivery and we follow orders dutifully, we don't speak up, we are not proactive. As an innovator, this made me very sad. We are trained to solve problems, not trained to find problems. We have this cultural thing — if I speak up, it is questioning of authority. This is totally counter to the Western mindset. We serve Western companies, and they expect us to speak up. John McCarthy, father of artificial intelligence and who was in my examination committee, once told me this unforgettable thing: Finding and articulating the problem is half the solution. The other half is to solve it.
Many of the solutions to yesterday's problems will be automated. But no matter how intelligent robots become, they will not tell us what the big problems are, they don't have the imagination of human beings. That's why I'm moving the company in that direction.
Do you think this will result in some confusion?
The results of the change will take a while. But the mindset change will happen instantaneously. The industry has been in a downward spiral, even the big western guys. They are hiring cheaper and cheaper, jamming people into projects faster and faster, hiring from more and more mediocre places. That is the wrong direction. That spiral goes to zero. We want to create an upward spiral, create more and more value. Turbo props were excellent planes, but they lost the battle to jet engines. There's a certain inevitability about going up the value chain.
Where do you see Infosys five years from now?
I see it as a next-generation services company that offers all kinds of amazing and innovative software solutions to the world's best companies. The world needs software right now, the world is being dramatically reshaped by software. I want Infosys to be not only the leading IT services company, but the leading IT company. It should continue to be driven by the humanity of our people, but it should embrace technology to create a much more amplified human effect. Prof Mashelkar (R A Mashelkar, former head of CSIR) used to have this beautiful line: "Do more with less for more". I want a much more productive, innovative Infosys, a company that customers think of when they think of their next-generation problems. Not just for staff augmentation — that's such a horrible idea.
How much of your US stint has shaped your thinking?
I don't know. I have now lived 27 years in the US, and 20 years in India. So a lot of that influence is there.
Do you think it's possible to have a startup culture in a big company with 165,000 people?
I think Infosys is a 165,000-people startup. We genuinely believe that. You have to have the mindset that the world can be significantly better than it is. You must have the imagination of what it could be like, the knowledge of how that could be made to happen. It is a borderline irrational conviction that you can do it.
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But how do you encourage entrepreneurship in a company that is so big? It is a legacy company...
I did two startups and doing a startup is an incredibly noble thing. It is one of the greatest experiences in life. And those people who can do it based on their life situation, must try doing a startup. But entrepreneurship is not the domain only of startups. It can be done anywhere.
In SAP, when I was trying to do Hana (the in-memory database), people said these guys have lost their minds, they must be on drugs, they said SAP will never build a database, let alone a next-generation database. But we did. My team had that culture. We are doing the same thing in Infosys.
A team in Pune is working on AI (artificial intelligence), creating a natural language-understanding system that automatically mines lots of text to find leads for the insurance industry. If there is a hurricane somewhere, or if a child is born, the system recognizes it as a lead for an insurance company, and provides the information to an agent. This kid came to me wanting to do something in digital agriculture because five generations of his family have been in agriculture. My wish is to see that we have 165,000 such entrepreneurs. We have a building in Hyderabad, it is water-cooled - innovated by our own people. It consumes 30% of the energy that normal buildings do. Google sent people there to see how it works. We'll soon have 20 LEED Platinum-rated buildings. We are probably the world's No. 1 company in sustainable buildings. Our Mysore campus pays for itself. All this because the infrastructure team has entrepreneurial thinking.
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You opened up Twitter and Facebook to employees. Is it part of the initiative to give more freedom to employees? It has been the norm in the IT services industry to restrict such activities because of customer concerns...
When I was in Stanford, one of the things that shaped my thinking was what is called the Honour Code. Examiners don't sit in the examination hall during exams. Students sign the Honour Code. Violation of the code is inexcusable. The assumption is we trust what you do — if you break the trust, there are unforgiveable consequences. And we empower the people to do the right thing.
We do not violate the things we commit to clients. We go to great lengths to ensure the freedom we give is not at odds with the commitments we give to clients - the number of hours worked, the conditions of the work, the security of the work. Not everything applies to everyone at the same time. If a client has certain requirements, those cannot be violated. But others who are not under that do not have to follow those requirements. So we now have this team to simplify things. They are looking at simplifying HR policies, maternity leave, and many other policies, without violating client commitments.
Someone told us recently that for the first time he was seeing world class software coming out of India. Do you agree with that?
Absolutely. All major planes we fly on have some major component in it that was designed by Infosys. Same thing is true for India. We are the best software nation. My advice to the Prime Minister is that when we think of 'Make in India', we have to think in terms of software. Software is changing everything. It's a software-defined world. High-tech manufacturing has become so sophisticated, you can't do it in physical infrastructure anymore. Even the simulations of next-generation machines are in software. We design drills for oil companies, those drills now have sensors. When the drill goes into production, it produces tonnes of data, and then we map that data into digital oilfields.
What are the big trends that you see in software?
One thing I would like to see is authoring - enabling people anywhere to write code, take programming from this art form that is available to a chosen few to making it massively available. I believe it will happen through better technology, better techniques, through pervasive education. Innovation in making programming easier is long overdue.
Then there's the ubiquity of connectedness. Look at the number of devices we carry. That may not be the case for much longer. This table (points to the table we are sitting on) will become digital, intelligent. This cup (our coffee cup) will be intelligent. Computing will become common, pervasive. We'll have intelligent, proactive software, software that understands. Our ability to prototype massively complex things quickly on demand will become much greater. That will impact every industry.
From a business model perspective, on how we consume these things, there is again a dramatic change happening. These things are becoming bite-sized, consumption-oriented, renting-oriented. Things like Uber - it is about using it at the right time and paying for it based on usage. There is a dramatically increased efficiency in consumption.
We are working on bringing this kind of an economy within Infosys. For instance, you should not have to go through a complicated procurement process. You should be able to get a project going as efficiently as hailing an Uber cab. In California now, there are all these things for babysitting, picking up groceries, ordering food.
You have P&L responsibilities too. How do you do the balancing between a techie and a bean counter?
Viable dreams have to be constructed. It is important to have imagination and to dream. But it must be viable. Design thinking teaches us that it has to be a combination of desirability, feasibility and viability. Apple is a great example of that. It developed the capacity to think through something deeply, to understand what the user is trying to do in certain situations, and enable the required features. It is not a common thing. Apple also has incredible engineering. And the phone is priced high, making it viable.
I do once in a while look at the quarter numbers. When I look at our fundamentals, our excellent campuses and people and the incredible demand for software in the world, I believe things will be ok.
You fired the CFO of your BPO business for not ensuring sufficient controls. Can you explain that?
When I joined Infosys, the thing I found exemplary about Infosys was this utmost rigour and respect for governance and corporate integrity. I had long discussions with Mr Murthy and others about it. We have been setting the pace, going ahead of the guidelines and policies in these matters. So everybody must meet those high standards. This did not happen in this particular instance.
You are based in the US, you have a good part of your core team in the US now. How is that working out?
It's a 13-and-a-half hour time difference, an insane amount of travel. But it works because of trust.
Do you have a personal jet, or do you lease one?
No, it is just all kinds of commercial airlines that I take. We have collaboration technologies, we have fancy telepresence systems, I have one in my home.
How much time do you spend in California?
It's insanely low. My wife — bless her heart — forgives me. I'm home 7-8 days in a month. I hope it will stabilize. I had to go to Japan last week. It was Thanksgiving Week. Thankfully, my wife could come with me. Even though I was working, we were together. When the 5,000-odd people taking the design-thinking course had completed it, I was to address them over video from California. It was the night of Diwali for me, though Diwali was over in India.
Are you looking at acquisitions? If so, in what areas?
Not yesterday's areas, but tomorrow's areas. Automation, artificial intelligence, collaboration technologies, things that move the ball forward. Improving productivity. In some cases, the geographical thing could be important. We are looking at more than a dozen opportunities.
Do you set targets for yourself, like 'we want to be No. 1 in IT services'?
No. We want to be the next-generation services company. Mr Murthy pioneered the global delivery model. I want to get us back to that point, where we are the defining bellwether company, and then those other things will follow. The key metric is whether our revenue productivity is improving or not. Another key metric is, when our clients think about next-generation problems, do they think about us - 'Hey, let's call those people at Infosys, they will do it for us'?
Is what is happening in ecommerce an opportunity for you?
It is. I want to do something enormous in this space. We are not quite there yet for me to speak about it meaningfully. Suppose I feel like eating Agra ka petha, how quickly can someone deliver that? This problem can be optimized in India in a very unique way. We have some ideas...working with some partners.
In the space that you operate, which is the company you most admire?
Of course, Apple. They have an incredible culture. Their devotion to getting the experience right is very impressive. They are a huge client of ours. I also admire many Japanese companies. Among the longest living businesses, the majority are Japanese. They think deeply about constructing systems that will last a long time. The scale at which the Chinese companies operate is amazing.
What about in services?
The greatest services company has not yet been built. We are in the process of building it. (Laughs)
What is your one-line verdict after your 121 days?
The best is yet to come.
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