Business Today, India: Cognizant’s CEO Says Firms That Reinvent Themselves are not Constrained by Demand

“IT is not a demand-constrained industry,” says Francisco D’Souza. “The global services industry is close to a trillion dollars annually. Even if you exclude parts of it saying those are not addressable, you still have a significant market opportunity.” Excerpts:

“Technology is going through a period of disruption. And it is different from prior periods of disruption. This period of disruption is longer than most traditional periods of disruption. If you think about digital, we have been talking about cloud, social, mobile, analytics for the past five years. Even today, there are big things happening in AI, robotics, Blockchain, Internet of Things, additive manufacturing. These are in early stages. The industry has to re-invent; services firms have to aggressively invest in reinventing themselves. Firms that do it — we have done that — are not constrained by demand.

Before 2016, clients did smaller projects, pilot projects, market tests with digital. In 2016 and 2017, we have seen them move to digital at scale. Most of our clients are ‘digital immigrants’. So, they have to change their business model because the rules of the competition are changing; they have to change the operating model because most of the time their operating processes were built for the physical world; then they have to change the underlying technology. Besides, technology is pervading all parts of an organization. A decade ago, my client was a CIO, and my market opportunity was the IT budget. Today, my client is the CIO but also the Chief Marketing Officer, the CEO, the business heads. I am selling to many more stakeholders and that gives me access to many more budget dollars.

The real differentiation is that we are able to work with clients to do digital at scale. The idea that we can help re-engineer the business model, the operating model and the technology model with real capabilities in these areas — consultants, designers, data scientists, good cybersecurity engineers — that is the differentiation. There are very few services companies in the world that have this end-to-end capability.

It's the best time to be a technologist and be in the services industry. The world is becoming far more technology intensive than ever. When the world becomes technology intensive, there is no doubt that it will need smart technologists to deliver results. Their role becomes more important. I don’t see the demand for technologists will be outpaced by the rate of automation. Technology will solve some of the hardest problems in the world over the coming decades; technology will play a role in global health, financial inclusion, food and agriculture. We are already doing this work.

Whatever university you graduate from today, if you do nothing, five years from now your skills will be largely obsolete. The fact is we have to be life-long learners.”

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