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    There’s only a pause in demand, recovery will be fairly fast too: TCS

    Synopsis

    Rajesh Gopinathan believes India's recovery from the Covid hit will be fairly fast.

    rajesh gopinath tcs bccl
    Tata Consultancy Services chief executive Rajesh Gopinathan discussed how the deal landscape is shaping up for the IT services provider and the underlying assumptions that provide confidence for a recovery following the Covid-19 virus outbreak, in an exclusive interaction with ET’s Anandi Chandrasekhar and Raghu Krishnan. Edited Excerpts:

    You seem to be more optimistic than others about a faster recovery?
    During the global financial crisis (in 2008), the regulators and the world discovered that a large segment of the BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance) market actually had a very weak foundation. When banks became inoperative because of the structural meltdown it actually cascaded into the real economy. Whereas, if you look at the current situation, no industry has suddenly discovered a structural problem. There is (now) an actual pause in demand, but in no industry – even the most impacted ones like travel and hospitality – has there been a structural problem. This situation has a very ‘zero or one’ kind of nature. We need a solution on the medical side and on the health side, but it is not as if the actual economy is spiralling out of control. That's the basic operating model and the assumptions on which we are basing it. The question is really not whether it (recovery) is (in) Q3 or Q4, the point is that the recovery should be fairly fast.

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    You mentioned secure borderless workspaces. How will its capabilities impact what offices of TCS will look like in future?
    We have been working on that for the last couple of years, what we call, open agile delivery centres. The secure borderless workspace is actually taking this further and saying not just do a co-locate… do this in a much more distributed and virtualised manner. Hundred percent of our people were working hundred percent of the time from offices. Now, we are almost at 0/0. We don’t think this is stable, but definitely we're not going to go back to 100/100. It doesn't really matter whether it is 25 or 50. The point is, it’ll never be 100/100. And, that is the way in which we build out our future capacity and infrastructure.

    back to business

    Last year, you won over $25 billion worth new contracts. Are clients continuing to spend on large deals?
    To predict both the volume and the nature of large deals is going to be very difficult. Enough customers are actually going ahead and closing on some of the conversations. One of our key customers in Germany signed a contract in the last week of March. Another customer in mortgage insurance in the US wanted to get the transition through because they didn’t want to lose the momentum.
    The Economic Times

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