Most challenging time for India’s IT sector till date, Says S Mahalingam

India’s information technology sector has never seen challenging times that it is witnessing now due to the Covid-19 impact, according to industry veteran S Mahalingam, but they have come up with innovative ways to deliver services.

“Nothing comes as a comparable thing to what is happening now,” Mahalingam, former chief financial officer and executive director at Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., said in an interview to PTI. “This is the most serious one; impact is going to be phenomenal because while essentially IT Industry has proved (its capability) … but we have to ensure that global businesses resume, and it’s going to take time and therefore its a very challenging time.”

“Global rules for migration will change, movement of people will change, there are many things that are going to change at this time,” Mahalingam said.

As far as export is concerned, Indian IT companies have come out with innovative ways of ensuring that delivery takes place flawlessly from the country, and have been delivering service at a very high level even in the lockdown situation, he said. “That’s a phenomenal kind of thing which shows that both the communication infrastructure as well as the ability to come up with a remote secure environment has really been extraordinary. That’s a great plus point.”

“Companies (clients) that IT companies serve should be healthy … and that’s something one needs to keep a watch on,” he said, adding that from the global value-chain perspective, the crisis has proven that Indian companies are very reliable partners.

Post the lockdown, Indian IT firms would see phenomenal amount of opportunity as companies, both private and government, would have to rethink on their business environment. “…the manner in which we run the business will make people to go for much greater IT enablement, whether it’s digitalisation of companies … this is going to make IT companies to do some innovative stuff, products; there is a huge opportunity.”

IT would play a larger role in construction and manufacturing companies going forward, according to him. “So, I think this has given a lot of food for thought for Indian IT companies as well and government also. If at all one sector … but for their clients not being healthy, that risk is there, which has proved that it can turn this (crisis) into an opportunity and come up with innovative solutions, its the IT sector.”

―Bloomberg Quint