Ability to rotate people across countries; certainty with regulations to help IT companies: Indian American CEO

It will be helpful for companies having major footprints in both India and the US, particularly in the IT sector, if they are able to rotate people across countries and there is certainty in terms of regulations, an Indian American CEO has said.

Nitin Rakesh, a distinguished leader in the IT services industry and CEO of Mphasis, said issues related to data privacy were important for IT companies as many Indian IT companies were expanding their footprints in the US and were now moving to smaller cities and rural areas of the US.

"Many of them (Indian IT companies) have actually opened local centres in onshore locations. Then they've gone… things like a rural showing within the US creating nearshore capabilities in towns," Rakesh told PTI in an interview on Thursday.

"Another company in our industry opened up a pretty large centre in Indianapolis two years ago because they think they can create 2,000 to 3,000 (jobs) there. We opened one in Dallas and then in Canada. So it's the ability to wherever you will find some talent. And of course, that has become a little bit less of a bottleneck, because, with this hybrid remote model, you can actually hire somebody who sits in Hawaii and works for you because they're logging those eight, 10 hours a day from wherever they're," he said.

CEO of Mphasis since 2017, Rakesh recently co-authored an award-winning book, ''Transformation in Times of Crisis - Eight Principles for Creating Opportunities and Value in the Post-Pandemic World'', a business playbook for leaders and businesses to transform a crisis into an opportunity.

The book has been recognised as ''Best Business Book'' in the ''Publication Award Category'' of American Business Awards and has won the International Business Book title at the 2021 Business Book Awards.

Rakesh is also an active member of various institutions globally, such as the US–India Strategic Partnership Forum (USISPF) driving financial services council and business relations between the US and India.

"Obviously there are things around data privacy in India that make life easier for our customers. So we as an industry, have a stake in the ground with that provision because we want to make sure that our customers don't have problems in getting work delivered from anywhere, and at the same time they can also have a local business in India," Rakesh said when asked about the policy recommendations to the Indian and US governments.

"The other piece that always continues to be in the discussion is the ability for our people to move across the border. So the whole immigration piece is always a big one for us because two-thirds of H-1B visas go to our industry. And in that the ability to bring people over and migrate and rotate them across countries is an important one for us," he said.

"I think other than that just making sure that we don't get stuck in unwanted consequences of some regulation. I think it's a lot calmer now than it was with the previous administration. Lots and lots of proposals with the previous administration, where there were some collateral damages, that were kind of coming our way," he noted.

Mphasis has doubled its market cap in the last five years and did quite well during the COVID-19 years despite the challenges being faced by it.

"So we roughly USD 1.8 billion in revenue right now with about 38,000 employees. The US is still the home market. US banking is still the primary business. So 60 per cent of the revenue is US banking and insurance and the rest of the businesses are split into other industries such as high tech, logistics and travel, and a little bit of healthcare," he said.

The company has a large India presence with 70 per cent of its headcount in the country with Chennai, Bangalore and Pune being its three big locations.

"A lot of work is being done, of course, in the migration to cloud area right now for the last two to three years. That's become the big theme," Rakesh said.

Growth of the company, he said, actually accelerated during COVID. "The industry was also a beneficiary. But more importantly, we have built the whole series of capabilities that clients are looking for when it comes to actually modernising their infrastructure, and application estate," Rakesh said.

"We have a pretty incredible footprint in areas like cloud and data, customer experience, cybersecurity, application modernisation, new application development, and so on. I think that's a quick profile of the business," he said, adding that the company had two years of strong growth in 21 and 22.

"This year we are all also dealing with some of the uncertainties that are being caused by the economic environment, but still it's a pretty strong growth environment.

Healthy double-digit growth is quite visible to the industry if you look at the spectrum of large companies, he said, adding that the supply side is obviously very constrained because the shortage of labour is also very acute in IT.

''That is something that we solve every day by reskilling people and bringing people to the workforce at the bottom of the pyramid," Rakesh said.

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)