Analytics the future for Mindtree to go beyond digital: Rostow Ravanan

Mindtree has reached its $1 billion revenue mark for the year ended March 31, 2019. As the company gears up to reach the next $1 billion target, Rostow Ravanan, CEO, Mindtree, says the company is already looking at what is beyond digital.

For the company, one of the first movers in shifting towards digital, which already accounts for about 50 percent of the total revenue. Ravanan said the vision is to get to the next $1 billion much faster and going beyond digital.

“For now, our mindset is in the next 4-5 years till we get to the next $1 billion. A lot will be incremental from where we are by doing more of the same thing and do them better. If we do everything right we can reach $2 billion faster than the first $1 billion,” he explained.

But, according to Ravanan, after the $2 billion mark, businesses and the business model will undergo changes. “So what we are beginning to think of is that what is beyond digital,” he added.

The idea, he said, is firstly to be a lot more non-linear. For instance, a company's revenue is currently proportional to the number of people working on a project, their utilisation and billing rate. “We need to figure out a way to break that,” he pointed out.

Unless companies find a way for non-linear growth from current operational model, it would be difficult to drive growth growing forward, according to Ravanan.

Another challenge is to build solutions for domains. Rather than becoming a “Salesforce” kind of horizontal business process, Mindtree intends to create specific solutions to catering to domain verticals like aviation.

“We understand airline industry and CPG very well. Let us say that we have six solutions that are required for end-to-end services for the airline industry. Similar to that, we can do for each of our vertical. Bring a solution that solve a set of solutions that are deep on domain,” he added.

The company is already working along these lines as it created a new unit ‘Enterprise re-imagination’ 6-9 months back. “We have taken certain themes like IoT for this case and building platforms on our own based on the customer needs and taking it to the market,” he added.

Another part of going beyond digital would be the focus on analytics, which Ravanan says will be the future. Ravanan said, “Today a lot of digital is on digital engagement. That has value but it will be only for the next few years. The most enduring part of what we are doing will be the data and analytics part.”

“We can drive insights out of our customer data are enduring trends that we will carry forward from now to then,” he added.

As much as Ravanan is enthusiastic, the takeover by L&T looms large.

Ravanan said, “We are dealing with it. It is not something we wanted but it has happened and we are dealing with it right now.” At Mindtree level between Chairman and the board are handling all shareholder related discussion. “My day-to-day stuff is completely focused on whatever I can do on business. What happens will happen,” he added.