Accenture India head Avinash Vashistha recalls his professional journey of two decades
Accenture asked Tholons, the India-based global leader in offshoring consultancy, to study how the top 20 IT firms around the world weathered the downturn of 2008-09. The presentation of findings, led by Tholons Head and Founder Avinash Vashistha, pulled no punches. Some of what it said was complimentary to Accenture’s peers but what it had to say about Accenture was not always complimentary.
Some in the audience, which included the chairman and CEO, the CFO and the like, didn’t like what they were told. But Tholons got support from some of the leaders. They realised that Vashistha knew the Indian scene, Accenture’s peers there, the state of the industry, was very well networked in India and importantly, unafraid in speaking his mind on what needed doing. The upshot was that Vashistha was hired to lead Accenture in India, taking over as its co-chairman and managing director in this geography. The other co-chairman retires later this year.
This – standing by and speaking up for what you believe in – is what has “set us apart through our entire 11-year history of consulting at Tholons and before that neoIT.” Sometimes it is an uphill task, as when they recommended about five years ago to Chevron that they must also look at tier-II suppliers when working with top Indian suppliers was itself a big mind change for them. “We reasoned that the mid-tiers are niche players, very good in domain knowledge. We had to fight for that. Eventually TCS and L&T Infotech won. Then people didn’t even know of L&T Infotech. We went further, recommended giving L&T Infortech a dollar an hour more. They have to compete with TCS, a tier-I company, which will have a better chance of recruiting and retaining people.” Today a significant part of L&T Infotech’s business comes from Chevron.
Vashistha readily agrees that “there is a big gap between IBM and Accenture in India. IBM does over a billion dollars business in India. They are aggressive, do good business, doing innovative things with Airtel — their claim to fame. Accenture is a great company, very customer oriented, superb people. The brand, what it stands for, what it does for the clients, everything is there.”
The challenge is to leverage all this, “bring the entire strength of Accenture and its people to really go after the market. My first mandate in Accenture is to grow the India business and thereafter the work that comes to India. I want to make Accenture the number one player — not just vis-à-vis IBM but TCS, Wipro and HCL too who are doing very well in India. If you look at their growth rates, some of them could catch up with IBM in three years.”
Vashistha anticipates that the India domestic software and services market is likely to grow in the 20 per cent plus range for years to come from the present $6 billion plus. Areas that look pretty good are e-governance, telecom – some entrenched players there – insurance and banking. Manufacturing will hopefully pick up in not two-three but five years. The big ones are not using as much of IT as they ought to. There should also be more adoption of IT in retail.
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IT or outsourcing without offshoring is 40-years-old and mature. Offshoring started in the mid-nineties so is 15-20 years old. “You have to evolve this model of globalisation. IT in general is becoming very very global. The maintenance stuff is very bulky, you need lots of resources to do that, India is the only one right now. For China, language and cultural understanding are still big issues. Ten years ago I thought it will take ten years, others said five, for China to catch up. Now after ten years it doesn’t look as if much will happen in the next ten years. So India has an extreme advantage vis-à-vis China for the next ten years.”
But Indian firms’ bread and butter will remain applications development and maintenance. They will not do much in systems integration. SI means going out into the US and Europe, getting solutions, hardware, doing implementation which is not a key offering of Indian players. SI, a bigger business than applications development and maintenance, will remain the domain for the global incumbents.
“In 2020, Indian leaders could be as big or bigger than the IBMs in applications development, maintenance and support. But when you take the entire stuff – consulting, application support and maintenance, systems integration and BPO – the top three or five international players will still be bigger. Between incumbents and challengers, the Indian players will still be challengers ten years down the line.”
Value will come for Indian players from integrating BPO with IT and adding consulting too. “You go to a retailer and say, how can I optimise your operation — warehousing, inventories, shop floor, customer satisfaction. If it requires the process to be changed, we will bring in technology and provide consulting to make the change. But getting into pure consulting – as opposed to consulting in relation to technology adoption – in which the Accentures lead, will be difficult.”