Microsoft Future Ready Industry week stresses on key trends driving digital transformation in the ITES sector

Microsoft’s Future Ready Industry week, ITES edition brought together industry luminaries from across India’s dynamic ITES sector to share perspectives driving India’s digital transformation in the sector. Industry leaders from leading organizations like Tech Mahindra, Wipro, Infosys, TCS, Genpact and EY amongst others shared valuable insights on how the ITES sector can deliver the right digital outcomes and innovation for customers, enhance employee productivity, foster a culture of collaboration, and enable new revenue streams via data driven business models.

CP Gurnani, Chief Executive Officer & Managing Director, Tech Mahindra in a fireside chat with Anant Maheswari, President Microsoft India spoke about how Tech Mahindra is leveraging technology across various domains.

Talking about how technology has empowered employees and customers, he said, "The pandemic increased the rate of technology adoption since we had to go virtual. Microsoft Teams made a huge difference during this timeframe since they were able to bring various pieces of technology into product development. Microsoft's rate of change has kept pace with the demands of the Indian IT industry and consumers globally. The Indian IT industry has grown by 13%-14% and the consumption of technology has nearly grown by 7%-8%.

Sharing his perspective on how India can become a digital powerhouse, he further added, “As a business, you need to anticipate the technology evolution and ways to improve the process. The question is whether we will be ready to stop using the word digital transformation and make business transformation the norm because digital gets buried when everything starts becoming a standard. The easiest way to do it is to evolve faster into business transformation, SaaS, Metaverse, or employee experience management.”

Sharing his views on the opportunities created by the accelerated adoption of digital technologies, during the session "Digital transformation & innovation for growth opportunities in IT/ITeS, Sanjeev Singh, Chief Operations Officer Wipro said, “Cloud is the biggest opportunity and has the biggest momentum where it has evolved from an infrastructure or service solution to become a platform as a service or software as a service. The flexibility it provides around scalability, security, speed to market, is immense and Azure plays a significant role in this space. Every company that has successfully been able to SaSsify or PaaSify its services or products have forged ahead at a much faster pace.

The “Future of IT services” session featured Nitin Bhatt, Technology Sector leader at EY who shared his perspective on the roadmap and growth drivers for the sector. Commenting on the transformation taking place across processes and systems to ensure a connected enterprise ecosystem experience, Nitin said, “Cloud is the key in terms of the need to adopt modern architectures to enable a cloud first and mobile first enterprise IT strategy. Cognitive services can be leveraged across the enterprise with companies finding interesting use cases, for instance around employee experience. In the case of revenue acceleration, digital has helped modernize inside sales, provided better strategies for pursuit enablement as well as a unified customer view while enabling the convergence of customer insights, which helps the sales team.”

Participating in a session titled "The future of work: Next gen hybrid workspaces" Richard Lobo, Executive Vice President, HR, Infosys and Gianni Giacomelli, Chief Innovation Officer, Genpact shared their perspectives on fostering a thriving work culture. Richard said, “For the first time since we got into the cubicle styled workspaces, we have had the opportunity to reinvent and relook at how we work. We need to see how people can deliver the best no matter where they are or what they use in terms of space or technology.” Gianni added “We need to reimagine and move away from the organizational design practices that we have been using for the last 50 years. We need to identify the right resources, which is about equipping people with their skills and putting them in the right place. We need to provide them with knowledge in the form of knowledge management and enable them through SharePoint work or Viva topics. We want people to collaborate, and it can be further supplemented with incentives, technology, norms, trust, and culture.”

Commenting on developments related to the session “Talent Transformation in the Digital World,” Janardhan Santhanam, Global Head - Talent Development, TCS said, “The TCS model of secure borderless workspace has spurred the ability to reach out to a much larger segment of people virtually and connect them to build networks without worrying about everyone being at the same place. On the learning front, we have been able to bring in substitutes for a lot of the in-person interactions that we used to do. Now with an AI tool, we can have 10,000 people practice power articulation using video-based AI. The pandemic and the secure borderless workspace model have thus helped the industry and us move from just doing physical or virtual or phygital to optimizing the blend of physical and virtual in a very contextual way based on what purpose we want to solve.”