The Teaneck, New Jersey-based firm, which follows a calendar 12 months, sounded the excessive notice after reporting a December quarter income of $4.8 billion—its best-ever quarterly earnings.
In an interview, Rajesh Nambiar, chairman and managing director of Cognizant India, and president, digital enterprise and expertise, spoke concerning the causes for the upbeat steerage, hiring plans and acquisitions technique. Edited excerpts:
What provides Cognizant the boldness to mission its highest-ever annual income outlook?
Our bookings for 2021 stood at $23.1 billion, which is about 22% year-on-year development in This fall alone. Our book-to-bill is at 1.2x, which signifies what we will do sooner or later. In order that’s an enormous constructive. The demand surroundings is sort of strong. We do see a major uptake for our companies enterprise basically and our means to develop. So, it’s constructive from the demand aspect of the equation. The availability aspect is clearly extra constrained than the demand aspect. However attrition has gone down by about 2%. So, after we have a look at the potential for us to capitalize on this market momentum, it’s simply phenomenal.
Have shoppers finalized their IT budgets? What areas will they be spending on?
We’ve vital momentum within the market. Once we have a look at the digital agenda, our shoppers are prepared to spend so much extra on digital transformation. The acceleration in spending on digital transformation, which began in 2021, will proceed in 2022. The trade demand stays strong and resilient. The demand for IT companies in 2022 will go a lot past that. This has additionally been validated by trade analysts’ outlook.
Expertise scarcity and attrition will stay a priority from the provision aspect. However on the opposite aspect, hyperscale firms are making enormous industrial investments to speed up their cloud migrations, that are very constructive indicators.
How is the pricing surroundings? Is there an upward bias for digital offers?
Pricing is a posh subject. Once you have a look at the digital aspect of the equation, shoppers are prepared to spend extra on very strategic digital sort of offers, however on the similar time, they may also optimize on the non-strategic or non-digital offers. So, there’s at all times a steadiness in all of that. The price of our worker base is clearly going to go up, and we have to get that charged by means of pricing or different means finally. It is among the huge levers for us to realize sustained development and margin.
Purchasers are prepared to pay extra for the appropriate capabilities and the appropriate kind of strategic interventions.
What are your hiring plans for 2022?
Final 12 months, we employed 33,000 faculty graduates in India. This 12 months, we plan to rent 50,000 individuals from campuses. We don’t give out the lateral hiring numbers, however our broad technique will likely be a mixture of campus, lateral hires, expertise by means of acquisitions, in addition to by means of coaching and selling our individuals internally. Within the final 12 months alone, now we have internally promoted about 14,000 individuals.
What’s your acquisitions technique, and which areas or markets will you be focusing on?
We are going to proceed to amass firms in what we name our digital backgrounds—digital engineering, synthetic intelligence (AI) and analytics, cloud, and web of issues (IoT). These are the 4 areas wherein now we have been buying firms. For instance, we acquired Linium within the cloud house; Servian within the information house; Magenic, Hunter Technical Sources and Devbridge within the digital engineering house; and ESG Mobility and TQS Integration within the IoT house. I feel now we have been ready so as to add the appropriate set of property and firms into our digital battlegrounds.
That has given us monumental energy, and it’s going to be one of many methods that we are going to proceed with.
How are you strengthening your consulting capabilities?
We’ve one of many very sturdy consulting organizations inside Cognizant. Most just lately, I feel now we have been in a position to deliver collectively a lot of our consulting capabilities, which existed in pockets, into one single group. So, now we have strengthened that portfolio.
We’re bringing collectively digital enterprise and expertise capabilities to leverage our energy as Cognizant by way of going out and competing within the market. Our capabilities which got here by means of acquisitions, have additionally added to our talents to win within the market. Right now, we’re a lot stronger as a consulting group than ever earlier than, and that’s the reason we’re successful within the digital house.
Supply: Live Mint