Sikka acknowledges challenges, says operational excellence started happening

For starters, Infosys is taking a relook at its consulting business

Infosys chief executive officer Vishal Sikka, during a recent investor conference, acknowledged that other than resuming the growth curve for the company, his focus is also to get discipline and operational excellence back.

“Typically, in a company of our size, these things—better account mining, process excellence, etc—are assumed, but we need to work on them. The ‘new and renew’ strategy that Infosys has come up with for clients is also applicable for us,” he said.

One area Infosys wants to reassess is its consulting practice. Sikka said that so far the consulting practice, which includes the Lodestone acquisition, were working in silos, but in the last few weeks that has been changed.

“Infosys had a significant consulting presence. We have 100 senior partners and 1,200 employees. Today, it is a siloed organisation. They were not selling Infosys. In a first step, we have taken 100 partners and made them co-leads along with sales head of 200 most important accounts for Infosys. These consulting leaders will, together with the sales leadership, go and have strategic engagements with the clients and we have incentivised these people to grow the Infosys business... we have given them a clear and substantive incentive,” he added. Infosys had acquired Lodestone in 2012 for $350 million.
 

Sikka also shared how some of the initiatives he had taken are shaping up. As part of its 'renew' strategy for its existing clients, the company has started a large scale effort to bring in innovation. This was based on study of 7-8 deals that Sikka along with a team went through and created a template to bring innovation that will be applicable to all existing projects.

"We have 35,000 ongoing projects in the company. This is the bread and butter of the company. This initiative has produced some exciting results. Almost 60 per cent of our delivery organisation is affected by this. And 400 client conversations have happened. This is all about renew, this is how existing deals will be going through," he added.

Similarly some of the recent acquisitions that the company has done also started yielding results. Sikka shared that one of the crucial elements of his strategy is improving the company's competitiveness and being more innovative. "This means improving our wining ability in new deals and improving productivity on deals. Beyond the operational changes we are bringing automation to the way we sell existing services," he said. The recent acquisition of Panaya is an apt example.

Sikka said that while Panaya has been growing significantly, Infosys sales team too have managed to successfully take this to existing clients in different vertical. "It is yet to make significant financial gains, but in the last 2-2.5 months every vertical has closed deals in Panaya. Infosys Sales team has learnt to sell this product," he said.