Most challenging time for IT industry till date: Mahalingam

India's information technology

sector has never seen challenging times that it is witnessing now due to theCOVID-19 impact, IT industry veteran S Mahalingam said on Tuesday even as he lauded the companies in the space for demonstrating their ability to be reliable partners during the lockdown period.

"I joined the IT industry in 1970, and also participated in creating this whole export and serving global customers and so on," noted the former Chief Financial Officer and Executive Director of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) in an interview to P T I.

'Maha', as he is fondly known in the industry, said Indian IT companies have "gone through" the Asian crisis, Y2K, and the 2008 global meltdown when many of the customers were affected.

 

"Nothing comes as a comparable thing to what is happening now. 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," he said.

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

He 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.

"That's a phenomenal kind of thing which shows that both the communication infrastructure as well as ability to come up with remote secure environment has really been extraordinary. That's a great plus point," Mahalingam pointed out.

"Companies (clients) that IT companies serve should be healthy..and that's something one needs to keep a watch on," he said but added that from global value chain perspective the crisis has proven that Indian companies are very reliable partners.

Post the lock-down period, Indian IT firms would see phenomenal amount of opportunity as companies in general, 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," Mahalingam said.

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," added Mahalingam.