Ashok Soota began his career in 1965 with the Shriram Group of Industries in India. In 1978, he became CEO of Shriram Refrigeration, a company which was unprofitable for four consecutive years. He went on to become the President of Wipro Infotech from 1984 to 1999. Under his leadership, Wipro’s IT business grew from US$2 million in 1984 to US$500 million run-rate in 1999.

In 1999 Ashok co-founded MindTree which in a span of 11 years became a global entity with revenue run rate of US$350 million, with over 9000 people and offices in multiple cities in the U.S., Europe and Asia. Happiest Minds (a next gen IT solutions & Services Company) was launched in August, 2011 by Ashok Soota and a team of industry experts, with the mission to create Happiest People and Happiest Customers.

Ashok is an industry leader. He was President of Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), India’s largest Industry association and also President of Manufacturers’ Association of Information Technology. He has served on the Prime Minister’s Task Force for IT and on the Advisory Council for the World Intellectual Property Organization, Geneva. He was recognised as ‘IT Man of the Year’ twice and as ‘Electronics Man of the Year’.

Can you give me some examples of how a business can conduct true transformational change through something like business analytics or cloud?(Puneet Jetli, Co-CEO of Happiest Minds Technologies) I think that what has happened is that for a long period of time organisations and enterprises have invested in actually trying to decipher insights from data and they found 2 problems that they have actually ended up as reporting tools, and when you are looking at reports they only tell you about the past. But in economies of today where growth is not a given, you have to be able to predict the future, and if you can predict it as accurately as possible it will give you a competitive advantage. The true way of doing it is to get into the world of analytics. The second thing that organisations have realised is that there is x amount of structured data, there is literally 10 times of that which is unstructured within the organisation as well as outside of it. If you now want to get into meaningful insights and take decisions, you can’t ignore this qualitative data. So that is where we believe the need of the enterprise is likely to be, and that it marries very well with our focus area of social media, getting social analytics marrying it with structured data, making it predictive so that you can then take the right bets and then reach out with the right offers, right products, right services to the consumers when they are likely to need it. In doing so, do it with the medium which is likely to be the most effective – if you can reach out with a discount coupon, based on past purchasing behaviour of a consumer or a set of consumers, to the shopper as he or she is entering the store you are most likely to make the impact, and that can only come if you look at some of these pieces of technology and integrate it in a holistic way. It requires understanding of social insights and understanding of analytics and purchasing behaviour, it requires creating a proposition and delivering on the mobile at real time to the consumer, and that’s what we believe most enterprises would be tempted to adopt in the years ahead.

So, in essence, business analytics can replace the need of invention and that the computer becomes the inventor and predicts a new product people are going to want.

Either a product or an opportunity, absolutely. That is where innovation is going to happen, you’d be surprised how many enterprises are figuring out that they are reinventing their businesses, to enable that you need insight and analytics.

(Ashok Soota) You used an interesting word then, ‘replaces’. Because in my mind it facilitates and expands that invention because you need it all the time, but it is one more new powerful tool that is giving you new thoughts and new ideas because of the analysis of that data and connoting that into intelligence.

Where is outsourcing going in 2012?

That’s a big question! There are one or two things to consider when answering a question like that. The first one is the environment. The convention would be to look at the economy, it’s in trouble, it’s a bad time also for the IT industry, but in reality it’s in times like this that people really need Information Technology, particularly with the new transformational technologies you are not talking of just cost reduction, you are really talking of enlarging markets, of opening new channels that didn’t exist in the past through technology. You will also notice that the IT intensity of the world is increasing by the day, industry by industry is becoming an internet company, what I’d call the creation of web 2.0 companies which are purely internet based. So IT still remains at the core of change. The need for outsourcing is increasing because people cannot capture all the expertise within their own system, there is so much to be integrated. As the speed of change increases, the complexity of the technology increases, and how can anyone, even the largest companies, incorporate all of the skills that they are going to require to implement this change, therefore the need for outsourcing increases exponentially. I would make a distinction here between outsourcing and offshoring. We don’t just want to be seen as an offshoring company, we see ourselves as working as partners to our customers, and we want to bring the best of both worlds to our customers. Here in the UK we have actually hired a considerable number of local citizens.

Speaking of hiring people locally, there was an article recently about Rackspace experiencing problems with hiring people that had cloud experience – is this a problem you’ve experienced in the UK?

(Ganesh Narasimhaiya Vice President & Country Head of Happiest Minds Technologies)

Cloud is a new technology so there is not an abundance of people but there are people chartered at around 10-12 months in the market and the focus we have on the next generation and the area of opportunity we are able to attract the right talents.

(Ashok) I mentioned about how our message resonated with customers, it has obviously resonated with people also. So we have demonstrated at an early age our ability to attract talent. There is the excitement of working in a start-up, there is the fact that people know that this is a company that focusses on these areas, and there is also the message of the company.

What about the term outsourcing, we’ve been seeing that companies want to move away from being associated with the word itself. Is this something you agree with?

I can understand and appreciate that. For a start I think we’d all like to be seen as partners and we’d be open to having that reflected in the business model. There could be the other approach of how do you go about co-creation with your customers.

What do you think will be the next big thing in outsourcing?

Hopefully the term itself will become less prevalent and less used and there will be a different name. I think you’ll see new business models evolving, more partnering, more outcome-based, more procreation and sharing of intellectual property.

(Puneet Jetli) We believe that a lot of that will be influenced by cloud. Cloud will not just be a medium to offer to our customers to reduce cost, but also look at bringing innovation to the market and I think it would mean a lot even for service providers like us to embrace cloud to provide services to our customers in a very different way to what we have traditionally been used to.

What particular innovations do you think will be in cloud?

I think we have to move away from the mind-set of looking at pure services to looking for solutions, where you are essentially looking at a business opportunity but backwards, you are essentially trying to assess a business problem. When you are creating a solution by yourself or co-creating it along with your customer then how do you manage end-to-end delivery of that. That is why we are not only in IT services, but also infrastructure management and security, because you have to give a holistic solution as a package on a software-as-a-service model if required for customers to really appreciate and benefit from the range of technology.