India's largest IT company by revenue, TCS, held its (and the country's) first-ever virtual Annual General Meeting. The meeting started with Tata Sons Chairman N Chandrasekaran and CEO Rajesh Gopinathan joining from TCS House and welcoming shareholders.
N Chandrasekaran, or Chandra as is he called, introduced the board of the company that joined from across the world. NG Subramanium the COO of the company joined from the TCS Bangalore office, Don Callahan joined from Boston, and Keki Mistry, the Chairman of the audit committee joined from Mumbai. The shareholders were given an e-voting facility for all board resolutions.
N Chandrasekaran started by talking about the impact of COVID 19 on operations. "In the past few months, the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic developed rapidly into a global crisis resulting in unfamiliar and uncertain terrain and affecting the very fundamentals of the world around us. In such an unforeseen scenario, your Company prioritized the health and safety of its employees while keeping its customers’ mission-critical systems running under very difficult circumstances and pitched in to help communities across the world to battle the pandemic;" he said.
He further enunciated on how TCS had swiftly moved its entire infrastructure to a 90 percent working from home model.
“The new operating model that we call Secure Borderless Workspaces (SBWSTM) has switched the focus from a highly centralized model, with large campuses accommodating thousands of employees to an extreme form of distributed delivery, with 90 percent of our 4-lakh-48-thousand strong workforce enabled to work remotely, in a matter of days. The SBWSTM not just enabled remote access but also calibrated our project management framework and security posture so that work could be properly allocated, governed, and reported while maintaining stringent security controls. SBWSTM is an extension of the Open Agile Workspaces framework that powered the innovative Location Independent AgileTM model that your Company pioneered two years ago;” he added.
While FY20 was a good year for the company with Rs 10,000 crore of added revenue, Chandra spoke about how the last 15 days of the fiscal have been the most critical.
“Though the pandemic reversed the positive momentum that we had started seeing in some of our biggest verticals in the first half of the quarter, on the positive side, TCS had very strong deal closures during the last quarter and the order book was the largest ever, from the time we started reporting the metric. Today, we have 49 customers who spend more than $100 million a year with us and we in turn help them realize their growth and transformation objectives. The strength of these relationships and the trust we enjoy is what gives us the confidence that we will come out of these difficult times stronger together;” he said.
The pandemic will also bring about opportunities for the company with clients realising the need for digital transformation as being the backbone of operations.
“The emergence of COVID-19 has resulted in many sectors adopting digital channels, these options which were secondary and nice-to-have options have become the primary channels, and in some instances, the only channels. This is the transformation that we had spoken of five years ago, when we said that ‘Default is Digital’. The sharp shift in consumer preferences has now forced enterprises to significantly accelerate their digital transformation initiatives;” he said.
Chandra also touched upon how TCS has contributed to assisting the society in this tough period. “TCS is using its technological prowess to help combat COVID-19 by leveraging its R&D infrastructure to run multiple threads, looking for opportunities to support high priority needs across the world. Some of our initiatives include the COVID-19 patient tracker, creating a quick and light platform for clinical trials systems to rapidly collate effectiveness data in collaboration with pharma and medical institutions, drug molecule discovery using our patented technology and frameworks and exploring promising ideas for affordable and effective ventilators and kits. We are also offering free access to the TCS iON Digital Glass Room, a virtual learning platform, to educational institutes across the country so their students' learning journeys could continue uninterrupted in a secure virtual environment;” he added
First Published: Jun 11, 2020 5:14 PM IST
