Working to create great tax portal: Infosys CEO Salil Parekh – Times of India
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BENGALURU: Infosys has regained its bellwether status in the Indian IT industry. Its revenue growth rate has been the fastest among peers for some quarters. Its share price is up 80% in one year. CEO Salil Parekh, has delivered on the three-year transformation he promised when he took charge in 2018. In an exclusive interaction with TOI, Parekh talks about what made the difference:
Infosys is doing better than almost all peers. What do you think was the key?
The key element has been bringing all of Infosys’s capabilities together — what we call ‘One Infosys’. And there are specific elements, like our cloud services offering Cobalt, where we are way ahead of some of our peers. Almost every new work that we start has some element of Cobalt, which has 200 industry templates and 14,000 cloud assets. Our focus is also to remain very close to clients.
Can you elaborate on One Infosys?
It’s soft, and difficult for us to make clear. But what it does is, the whole company is working together on everything. In many of the large transformation programmes, it’s the whole capability set that comes together to make the difference, unlike earlier, when only some elements would be there. The good part is, within Infosys, we have leading capabilities in 8 or 9 areas that require us to make this work. And within digital, we have leading capabilities in about 30 areas, across cloud, data and analytics, AI, automation, cybersecurity, IoT.
Is the mega (over $1-billion) deals upcycle showing signs of saturation?
We have in our large deal vocabulary everything above $50 million, and that is what we talk about. We see a good pipeline of that. What you’re calling mega deals, the periodicity is different. On an annual basis, we see a good pipeline. We have been fortunate that clients have looked at us to give more and more work. Digital transformation was happening even before the pandemic. But since then, even those who were behind in it, want to catch up. It’s a huge modernisation effort.
How much of a concern is attrition to you?
Compared to the industry, we are at the lower end of attrition levels. It has not impacted the work with our clients because of the massive inflow of new talent. We have also put in place many actions to tackle attrition — the way we connect with our employees, our compensation plans, our focused programmes on different skills.
Fresher salaries have barely moved beyond the Rs 3.5-lakh mark for years…
Last year, that was where we were. At this stage, there’s no change. But there are significant changes for other levels.
There continues to be a lot of criticism around income tax portal glitches…
Many areas which required attention at start, we have spent time on a lot of those things and they are working well today. We are working collaboratively with the department, with the association of CAs, and with a group of individual taxpayers, to make sure we create a great new experience.
Infosys is doing better than almost all peers. What do you think was the key?
The key element has been bringing all of Infosys’s capabilities together — what we call ‘One Infosys’. And there are specific elements, like our cloud services offering Cobalt, where we are way ahead of some of our peers. Almost every new work that we start has some element of Cobalt, which has 200 industry templates and 14,000 cloud assets. Our focus is also to remain very close to clients.
Can you elaborate on One Infosys?
It’s soft, and difficult for us to make clear. But what it does is, the whole company is working together on everything. In many of the large transformation programmes, it’s the whole capability set that comes together to make the difference, unlike earlier, when only some elements would be there. The good part is, within Infosys, we have leading capabilities in 8 or 9 areas that require us to make this work. And within digital, we have leading capabilities in about 30 areas, across cloud, data and analytics, AI, automation, cybersecurity, IoT.
Is the mega (over $1-billion) deals upcycle showing signs of saturation?
We have in our large deal vocabulary everything above $50 million, and that is what we talk about. We see a good pipeline of that. What you’re calling mega deals, the periodicity is different. On an annual basis, we see a good pipeline. We have been fortunate that clients have looked at us to give more and more work. Digital transformation was happening even before the pandemic. But since then, even those who were behind in it, want to catch up. It’s a huge modernisation effort.
How much of a concern is attrition to you?
Compared to the industry, we are at the lower end of attrition levels. It has not impacted the work with our clients because of the massive inflow of new talent. We have also put in place many actions to tackle attrition — the way we connect with our employees, our compensation plans, our focused programmes on different skills.
Fresher salaries have barely moved beyond the Rs 3.5-lakh mark for years…
Last year, that was where we were. At this stage, there’s no change. But there are significant changes for other levels.
There continues to be a lot of criticism around income tax portal glitches…
Many areas which required attention at start, we have spent time on a lot of those things and they are working well today. We are working collaboratively with the department, with the association of CAs, and with a group of individual taxpayers, to make sure we create a great new experience.
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