Executive Vice Chairman of Cognizant India Says the Demand Environment is Healthy

“We see a healthy demand environment for our services. Our win rate has been pretty healthy. Overall we feel pretty good about our business outlook and that’s why we have revised our revenue guidance upwards,” R. Chandrasekaran tells Bloomberg TV. Excerpts:

“Our strategy to help our customers ‘run better’ in terms of improving operational efficiency, and ‘run different’ in terms of digital transformation has played out nicely.

We continue to work hard in terms of mining our existing customers, helping them transform some of our client engagements through our digital strategy.

We’ve also been winning a large number of integrated, multi-year, multi-billion dollar deals. Many are expected to ramp up and that’s why we feel good about the demand outlook for our services.

Customers are talking about technology beyond the CIO organization. For example, marketing divisions of all organizations are talking about digital marketing and digital transformation. We need to build scale on foundational technologies such as SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) to take a complete suite of offerings to our customers to help them with digital transformation.

Cognizant is in the forefront of leading this digital technology wave for several quarters now. We have started winning significant SMAC deals. The reason we’ve revised guidance upwards is because of a healthy pipeline.”

“We see a very good demand environment in the market. Some of the client specific issues that we talked about last quarter have abated. The strategy of reinvestment and of helping clients ‘run better’ and ‘run different’ is working,” R. Chandrasekaran tells ET Now. Excerpts:

“Our strategy of reinvestment has helped us maintain industry-leading growth for several years. We strongly believe in that strategy and will continue to make investments to deliver industry-leading growth. We are winning several integrated deals and marquee names in digital transformation. The sales cycles will continue to be long as deal sizes are large. Deals are also complex as we’re talking about large integrated deals, a combination of infrastructure services, application services, business process services.

Our win rate is pretty good. We’ve won significant number of very large deals. We are very optimistic about the future outlook for the company.”