You expect a chief executive officer (CEO) in his second month in office to be in a hurry to reorder things a bit — more so if he’s stepping into big shoes of a star predecessor. But I sense none of it in 47-year-old Anant Gupta, the new CEO of $4.2 billion HCL Technologies, as we settle down for lunch at Taipan at The Oberoi, New Delhi, writes Shailesh Dobhal. Gupta says he is a light luncher, and we decide on some soup – hot and sour chicken for him and clear vegetable for myself – Bengal Bekti in black bean sauce, noodles and some sticky rice.
So, when did he realise he may have made the cut for the top job? “From the timing perspective, I have no view, but from the way my portfolio has been growing, it’s been going on for a while.” Beyond the infrastructure management vertical that Gupta help build into a billion-dollar business for HCL Tech, Europe, too, fell into his lap in the last three years, followed by application development. And in July last year, when Gupta took the chief operating officer’s role at the information technology (IT) company, the succession plan was pretty clear to everyone.
Isn’t there a burden of expectations coming in after a larger-than-life persona of Vineet Nayar, who still remains the company’s vice-chairman, and nine straight quarters of market forecast-beating performance? “Well, there always is,” Gupta makes light of the question, almost managing to dodge it. “All our engines are firing in terms of operations, execution, cash flows, the pace with which we have been growing, and the leadership position we have achieved in certain service lines. And to keep pace with this growth will obviously be challenging.”
But how will HCL under Gupta be different from the one Nayar shaped?
“Are we a company with a great research and development kitchen, or are we going to create one? The answer is no. What we believe has worked for us as a team, that is having our ears to the ground, being able to smell what’s there and then quickly putting our whole engine behind. That’s our core fabric and it will stay.”
Listening to Gupta speak on what’s going to drive the business for HCL – continental Europe, the $50 billion rebid business, being relevant to the market rather than building proprietary technologies or platforms, to a slow-and-steady game of moving clients to end-to-end outsourcing – I get a sense of déjà vu of my last meeting with Nayar few months back. But then, Gupta’s elevation is as much about ensuring continuity – he is an insider who has been part of the reinvention of a struggling firm – as driving change in a calibrated manner, keeping the culture and capability of the organisation in mind.
So, little is known about Gupta beyond that he’s been with HCL since 1993, I decide to probe a bit. “I went to school in Chennai, Kolkata and finally finished from Modern School, Delhi,” shares Gupta. Next, St Xavier’s College, Mumbai for undergraduate studies in Physics, and masters in telecom engineering from the University of Liverpool. And, contrary to what a few news pieces on him have reported, Gupta is not an HCL lifer. He started out with QSO Consulting, a UK-based product engineering consultancy in mid-eighties, moved on to telecom products and services firm India Telecom, a Sanjay Dalmia company back then, before joining “a group of four people, with Vineet being one of them, at HCL Comnet, in 1993”. And why did he pick HCL back then? Gupta doesn’t duck this one. “Since this team did not really have a blueprint of what it wanted to do, I thought I would have more space [to experiment].”
After the mid-2000s, HCL turned around the axis of remote infrastructure management, which it adopted almost with an evangelical zeal. Is there a danger of relying too heavily on the vertical, I ask Gupta, who has gone ahead and even authored a techies’ guide on it published jointly by HCL and the representative industry body, the National Association of Software and Services Companies. “Well, there is still a huge latent, under-penetrated market in infrastructure management and we’ll, therefore, continue to see high growth there. But I also see a lot of integrated deals where infrastructure and application management will come together.”
And what’s his view on the dwindling IT business margins across the industry, more so when HCL has historically punched below the industry average. “The key is to be significant to the customer, and not to play in just one fragment of the market with higher margins. We decided to play in the total outsourcing market.” Guess, being market-relevant has been hard-wired in Gupta, who along with Nayar has seen HCL pull back from the brink in the mid-2000s.
I quite relish the baked Bekti, done just right, but I realise Gupta is not just what he claimed – a light eater – but a slow one, too. Or, maybe I am asking him too many questions, leaving little time for him to eat. Just to make amends, I pause to let him catch up on the fare.
His profile that the company shared with me says he likes reading books on management strategy. So, what book is he reading currently? “I have not been reading one for the past six or eight weeks. But the last one I read was management consultant McKinsey’s The Granularity of Growth.” The theme, explains Gupta, is a call to go beyond broad trends, and look at your business granularly across three dimensions — geography, markets and service offerings. “And, crucially, the book also delves into what not to do.” Incidentally, Gupta shares that the company divested Capital Stream, a financial product that it bought in 2009, last week, since it no longer fits with its strategy of not competing with industry partners who own software platforms. So, he does take his reading seriously after all!
Is hiring slowing down in the IT sector? And what about stories of fresh engineering graduates sitting with job offers with joining being endlessly delayed? “Yes, we do have a backlog. But one thing we don’t want to do is onboarding for the sake of it, and have a larger problem later.” Does he see the situation changing anytime soon? “I see it as a big industry-wide problem. Given that the business mix is changing, growth rates are different [lower], and the market demand is not in the traditional skill sets. Therefore, skills sets [of freshers] need to be much more fungible.” Are engineering campuses in sync with challenges that the industry is facing? “Well, the change is slow, and it’s not so much technical skills but the mindset.” For instance, Gupta points out that he would like to see more students use the lean period in the campus to do more diverse programmes and skill up to become more relevant to companies like his.
How does he get away from the humdrum of his work-life? “I start with yoga everyday, and whenever I can, I drive to the hills, or play pool with friends at home. And yes, my two Labradors, Rocky and Tyson, keep me and my daughter engaged.” Lunch over, we order coffee, and the conversation moves to Delhi spring, the joys of rooftop family lunches, besides how anyone who can connect the club with the ball is a golfer!
