Based in Singapore, Vish Iyer is president, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS)-Asia Pacific, where he is responsible for managing TCS operations across five geographies and 13 countries in the region. Recently, he had a freewheeling conversation with Zafar Anjum in TCS' Singapore office. The discussion ranged from his new role in the company to the company's initiatives and plans for the region. Here are excerpts from the interview.
First tell us about your new role, what it entails and how it is different from your past responsibilities.
There is no fundamental change in the role. We run Asia Pacific as a P&L. I took over the P&L role two years ago from Girija (Girija Pande, chairman of Tata Consultancy Services for the Asia Pacific region). He was then the chairman of the company. So, both of us were available side by side. Girija was focusing on China and I was focusing on all other markets. So, what it means is that a lot more personal attention to China will be the single most important change, if at all. I was always on the board of TCS China. I used to go there once a quarter. Now I will probably go there much more frequently. Other than that, functionally it is the same thing.
Is China the new focus area for TCS?
It has been in focus for a while. Let me start with TCS and we come back to China.
As you wish.
You would have seen our results of last quarter and the quarter before and so on. The results have been very rewarding overall. What is more rewarding is that it has been a uniform growth. There are no markets which are bad and markets which are good and so on. The way we position ourselves with customers and industry verticals and the investments we made long ahead of the peer group in far-lung markets and technologies--all of that, we believe they are all nicely coming together.
In terms of outlook, people have always been asking our executives--what do you think of this market and that market and so on. Our messages have been consistent and our executives have been calling out, saying that markets are uncertain. The economic uncertainties are there for everybody to witness. However, there is also demand; there is also growth opportunity available. There is a lot more diligence on projects; a lot more time taken by people but people are spending money on transformations and spending money on regulatory compliances, spending money on M&A-driven work. So, there is demand as long as you work the right markets and customers. Our executives have been saying this consistently for the last three or four quarters, while messages from the rest of the industry players have been mixed, based on tactical view of that quarter, or some company-specific issues, and so on. So, for a while, industry was watching everybody and saying there is an industry issue or company issue. So the consistency of our message and the fact that quarter after quarter, we have been able to consistently deliver gives a lot more confidence in the company. So, that is reflected in market cap and other things.
We had a good quarter all around. We had our own share of wins as well. We were not good at announcing some of the wins that we had. We had two wins in ASEAN that we haven't been able to talk about publicly. And they are all absolutely transformational events. One is in the airline industry and another in discrete manufacturing industry. They are not run of the mill transactions.
That's the overall context in which we are talking. Now, I will talk about China and Japan. Both have been focus countries here (in Asia Pacific). In Japan, we announced a joint venture with Mitsubishi Corp--a TCS majority-owned joint venture focusing on designing and delivering solutions for the Japanese market. So, we started off with some engagements with them; more importantly, alongside with them, in the market. We are pretty bullish. That will significantly boost our local capability, either in terms of understanding the market, in terms of relationships, and in terms of actually designing solutions. Things are different in each market. The way you work a deal, you spot and operate an opportunity; each one is different in each market. That is Japan.
On China, there is no structural change. We continue with our joint venture with the Chinese. More recently, we opened a centre in Dalian to cater to Japanese businesses and we have two banks already using that delivery centre. So, with the focus in Japan, and focus on China, Dalian as a bridge is the right thing for us to do.
Last quarter, in Singapore, we set up a laboratory, a centre of excellence, inside Singapore Management University. We call it the iCity Lab-i stands for intelligent cities. That is generating lot of interest, initially in China and then we will take it to the rest of the world. There are two solutions that have caught people's attention. One is on healthcare, the other is on education. The healthcare solution involves first of all managing the entire solution of residents in a city; alongside with that, the solution provides a personalised page for individuals-health records, measurements, blood pressure, etc. The system generates early warning alerts (based on trends). So, the citizen can seek help proactively or the doctor can advise him.
The other solution that is gathering momentum is education. There are various forms of this. The solution that we have put on the table is on uniform content administration on the cloud.
So, there are many built-to-suit-all kinds of solutions. That is an area that is receiving a lot of attention.
On the third front in China is the banking product, TCS Banks. The more recent one we have done there is again based on a cloud environment for the village bank. I don't know if you are aware of our initiative in India. We have a company called C-Edge, a joint venture with the State Bank of India. What we have done in this company is that this company provides TCS Banks, the core banking product, on a cloud model to small cooperative banks and credit unions on a pay by use basis.
So, because of this, the same technology that powers State Bank of India is suddenly available to a small cooperative credit union in, let us say, Maharashtra--this bank could not have afforded an IT department. We have close to 3200 branches running on our cloud based environment in India.
When the entire cloud discussion unfolded, our first objective as a service company was to say, what can we do with the emerging cloud trend? To us, unless there is a fee paying customer, who uses this in a mission-critical production environment, we don't have a proof point. So we went about creating TCS Banks on a cloud as a first offering.
The second is we started a small and medium initiative in India. We picked five industries and if you look at SMB customers, the IT requirements can be significantly standard-you need a payroll, you need a CRM, you need a billing data, a backend system, pretty much the same. We offer the entire solution on cloud. We have about 200-220 customers. We are looking to scale this up further.
You don't have too many examples to talk of like these two cloud examples in India--commercially leveraged clouds. We are also capable of executing it for other people. I don't need to run the cloud. You can run the cloud and I can provide that to you. That's what we have done in this China example.
