HCL Technologies looks to ride on digitisation wave

HCL Technologies, India's fourth largest IT services company in the country and reporting 14 percent growth year-on-year, aims to ride the digitisation wave to maintain sustainable growth in the coming period as well as its "co-innovation" labs.

Currently, HCL has six co-innovation labs (the India unit based in Bengaluru) or designated laboratories where the IT services company researches future technologies with clients and then develops them into a product if feasible.

"HCL Tech is continuously focusing on the changing technological environment and is investing accordingly. The company is investing in co-innovation labs and in increased re-hiring, which will start benefiting by the second half of this year," said HCL Technologies CEO Anant Gupta.

"We have already hired 100 senior leaders to boost the research at these labs," he said. The company was on a hiring spree last financial year and had hired 5,000 new employees.

Explaining the company's strategy, Gupta said:"Digitalisation in infrastructure, modern application and engineering services is going to aid HCL's growth. Along with the (other) European market, Germany and France will also serve as an opportunity for the company."

HCL also seems to be betting on other aspects of engineering and research and development (R&D) services which showed a 25.8 percent increase year-on-year.

"Communications equipment, medical devices and software produc reengineering were the key areas of focus for us last year and will continue in the next year," said engineering and R&D service vertical president G.H.Rao.

The company has also seen growth in its applications services which accounts for a sizeable portion of the company's revenue and has shown a 7.7 percent year-on-year growth.

"Change in the style of doing business has driven up the demand. Digitisation of businesses, mordernising app journey and data analytics are the verticals that will drive the demand. Digitisation accounts for one-third of our applications services revenue," said system integration and applications services delivery president Ajit Kumar.

Gupta added: "The nature of that engagements are shifting - digitalisation has been there in infrastructure, it is there in engineering, it is also there in modern applications that we do but the way we looked at the market going ahead is innovation along with our customers and building some of the transmission programmes for the future, they will take time."