Infosys in no way will become a product company: Vishal Sikka

Infosys CEO & MD Vishal Sikka on Wednesday said that despite the rapid progress the company made in bringing innovations powered by automation, artificial intelligence, products and platforms, there is no way that it would become a product company.

This is primarily because of the fact that the world itself is moving the services away with disruption happening in every segment, he said addressing the Morgan Stanley TMT (Technology, Media and Telecom) conference held in San Francisco late yesterday.

“The endeavour is not to become a product company; that will completely miss the point. At a time when everything is becoming a service, why would a services company want to become a product company? The idea here is to productise intellectual property in service of the project to amplify the ability of the people to do more with less for more. That is the basic endeavor here.”

The Infosys CEO also reiterated the commitment to achieve the industry leading growth in the ongoing financial year and the long-term goal of touching $20 billion in revenue with 30% operating margin and $80,000 revenue per employee in calendar year 2020. In company, he said, would be able to achieve these with minimal investments, both in people as well as acquisitions.

“I am quite satisfied with the early progress but it is still early and a lot is still in front of us. Our endeavour is to have consistent profitable growth and we don’t believe in sacrificing margins in order to grow. We are on track to get to industry leading growth in next financial year. We want to be a global leader in this new kind of IT services," Sikka added.

After he assumed the charge of CEO & MD at the Bengaluru-based company in August 2014, Infosys had introduced a new strategy with a focus on renewing the existing services and get into newer areas.

A part of that strategy was to acquire newer capabilities by acquiring small but niche technology companies which can complement the new strategy with their expertise and solutions. Sikka said the company would company would continue to look for such companies, but it’s not certainly looking at any large acquisition for scale.

“Our objective is to have consistent profitable growth and we believe that we can achieve all of these without making too many investments,” the Infosys CEO said.

“We will make acquisitions, small ones, very niche, focused on high and complex technologies which will give us a jump in our road forward and enable us to accelerate our journey, and that is something we are excited about.”

“We will make acquisitions, small ones, very niche, focused on high and complex technologies which will give us a jump in our road forward and enable us to accelerate our journey, and that is something we are excited about.”

The company’s deal win rate has risen considerably while the size of the deals has more than doubled to $800-$900 million in a quarter as compared to the earlier period. Besides, the growth rate of the top clients has now exceeded the average company growth rate.

Sikka said as the company is now in the midst of this journey to become the next generation services company, its focus will be on getting into more out-come based and fixed price projects that would require new kind of expertise to sell the software and IP-led innovation.

"I think, going forward the go-to-market has to scale to bring innovation to every client. We need bring this to every clients now and that’s our big endeavour as we look at the new financial year ahead of us.”