What is HCL Technologies’ focus area for the next five years or so?
We see cloud to be the biggest spend area for all our clients and all our businesses, whether it is digital foundation, digital business, digital engineering, and products and platform, they are going to benefit from the scale up of the cloud opportunities. So I think that is the most important business focus to really tap all the opportunities around the cloud.
We have an offering called Cloud Smart that provides independent consulting around the cloud transformation journey for our clients where they can choose from different hyperscalers and technology solutions. One cornerstone of our cloud smart strategy is the ecosystem partnerships. We have the strongest ecosystem partnerships with AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, as well as the hybrid cloud practice with IBM.
How does HCL pitch itself when it comes to tapping opportunities from the big tech companies?
We have the largest technology and services vertical, contributing to 18% of the revenue. This is probably the highest among our peer group. So this is all about servicing some of the big tech companies.
You recently stated that the company is not looking at large acquisitions and an organic growth strategy but have announced smaller acquisitions over the past week. What is driving this?
Our stream of thinking is to acquire more vertical and industry-specific capabilities. Like in banking, wealth management is a very important area and it has multiple strong products, like Avaloq, for instance, across different geographies. Confinale (acquired for 53 million swiss francs) is a company which has good capability in wealth management consulting. And we already have a strong implementation capability. So we acquired the front-end piece.
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Has the growing geopolitical uncertainty globally changed the kind of solutions that clients seek? Are they looking for more decoupled solutions?
This is not a new thing, a lot of big companies have always been talking about composable platforms. So composable platforms gives you the flexibility to make these changes, demarcations and segregations as per the business requirements and build new applications, build new controls, create more security postures, so that’s been a good trend for a lot of companies.
And has this demand for composable solutions converted to revenue?
I think last year 50% of the incremental revenue that we got has come from a digital applications business focused on building composable applications, digital platforms, analytics, data, among others in (this space).
