For first time, India’s 3 biggest IT firms share a stage

MUMBAI: In what was history of sorts and a rare photo opportunity for shutterbugs, the leaders of India’s three biggest IT companies – TCS, Infosys and Wipro, with a combined market cap of Rs 12 lakh crore – shared a public stage for the first time.
TCS CEO Rajesh Gopinathan, Infosys CEO Salil Parekh and Wipro chairman Rishad Premji came together at the Nasscom Technology Leadership Forum (NTLF) 2020 in Mumbai on Wednesday to brainstorm on how the next techade (tech decade) for the Indian IT industry is going to play out.
While much of it was serious discussion, there were also many lighter moments. When the moderator pointed out that all three firms were competing fiercely for projects globally, Premji quipped, "No, we are friends."
On strategy, Premji said his company's philosophy is to combine product and services and deliver them to clients. "We will increasingly see the productisation of services (for the whole industry)," he said. The $191-billion IT industry, which gets almost all its revenue from the services business now, is increasingly getting into platforms and products as IT business models change.
Gopinathan said, "If you see the top three banking platforms globally, these platforms belong to Indian IT services players," he said. Infosys' Finance and TCS' BaNCS are homegrown core banking platforms used by banks globally.
Parekh said the growth trajectory of the product business would pan out differently. “Platform-led service offerings in insurance and mortgage (segment) or automation are some of the channels," he said.
Parekh said India sits at the forefront of global technology innovation. “If you look at the cloud ecosystem, Indian IT firms are leading the race," he said.
Indian IT has been steadily increasing its share of the global outsourcing market. When cloud and SaaS emerged, and began to change business models, there were some who had predicted the death of Indian IT. Those predictions have fallen flat. Indian IT reinvented itself, skilled its employees in emerging areas, and today are even stronger partners to many of the world’s biggest companies.