Embracing New Technologies
What is your view of the performance, so far, of the Indian ICT industry in 2019? Customers have started understanding Digital Transformation. From a buzzword, it has become an action item. From ‘nice-to-have’ it has become a ‘must-to-have’. Customer Experience in any industry has become digitised. To create a frictionless organization, People have started to understand the value of extraction of insights from data that’s where we come in with our digital transformation solutions like Liferay, Business Intelligence, Advanced Analytics, Cloud Solutions, AI/ML, Software Defined Networking, HCI etc.
What is your view on FY 19 in terms of business and financial performance? Please share any two key highlights.
We have invested last one year in consolidating and stabilizing ourselves for a rapid growth period. In FY 1819, we reimagined our strategy, with our latest experience centre at Gurgaon, Xanadu. Xanadu is where magic happens and it based on Mandrake the magician. Recently we have launched our second Xanadu in Bangalore which gives an even better customer experience. Xanadu places us in a very unique position to showcase the latest technologies - Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Software Defined Networking, Hyper Converged Infrastructure, Smart Meeting Room Schedulers, Liferay, Intelligent Conferencing Room Solutions, Smart Printing Solutions, Mobility solutions with relevant use cases across different industries. The Network Operations Centre (NOC) facility is situated in Gurgaon, to serve our customers 24*7. Our financial performance was moderate last year with about 6% growth over FY 17-18.
What is your business outlook for FY 20 and what are the key focus areas?
MPS- 50% growth, huge growth in WS & Apple business & low growth in ES.
In FY 20, we are aiming for a 40-50% growth since we are looking at a 50% growth in our MPS business, huge growth in Workspace and Apple business followed by Enterprise solutions, managed services & SMAC.
Over the next 12-18 months, we want to go deep into the existing markets we operate, especially down South. Our focus will be to develop the market, customers, people and processes. Moreover, we are focused to improve our warehousing and supply chain processes in order to double our revenues over the next 2-3 years. We are improving our processes to make a robust supply chain where orders can be executed with minimal time lapse and no requirement for warehouses at all. This will enable us to cut costs and execute projects efficiently.
On the technology front, we are doing some turnkey enterprise mobility projects. For example, we have done digital transformation projects with some of the biggest companies in pharma, auto & NBFC like Ford, Maruti, Home Credit, etc. Some of the biggest Indian banks have also been our customers where we have designed, architected, deployed & managed their data center infrastructure. We also look at predictive analytics as one of our solution-based growth drivers.
The mobile & business apps is another area where we are focusing since that complements one of our biggest division which is enterprise mobility where we provide mobiles and tablets to our customers like Maruti, Lupin, Uber and many more. Now, we have plans to offer our software applications and hardware combined as a solution-as-a-service. We are also betting big on Platform-as-a-service with the likes of Liferay, Workplace by Facebook, Elastic Search etc.
What is the influence of the emerging technologies? How will it impact the next couple of years?
Across industries, organisations are actively embracing new digital technologies. Technologies such as IOT, ML, AI, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Big Data Analytics are a reality with use cases which cut across Industries. For example, blockchain which was thought to just have use cases in financial services and retail. It is increasingly been used in Agriculture, Healthcare, logistics etc. These emerging technologies are changing the way we are used to dealing with problems and are making the solutions far more impactful and effective. For instance, using image recognition and deep learning we can detect all sorts of skin cancers in very early stages which makes tech really powerful in the future. The future continues to look bright for the Indian Tech Industry. The IT industry is anticipated to grow around 10%-20% for several more years with all the emerging technologies increasingly becoming mainstream and adoption across industries.
Ranjan Chopra, CEO, Team Computers, gives an overview of his organisation’s financial performance in 2018-2019 in this interaction with us