Focus more on right blend of skills than offshore-onshore mix, says HCL Tech EVP on H-1B visa issue

Q: You have joined in your new role at a time when a lot of change is happening in the industry, including automation. There is a lot of talk around temporary US work visas as well. Is there any conversation around how HCL should be projected in the US market?

A: I think it’s important to know that across the world, things are changing in every market, in the entire industry. We are seeing most industries, most companies are in the middle of a hardcore digital transformation and many of them are getting a good taste of AI right now.

Our challenge is to make sure we get the best mix of people to the right place at the right time. We represent 144 nationalities in the company in the US market. There is very specific geopolitical environment right now in the US. But for us, for many years, it has not been as much of an issue.

For many years we have been ahead of the industry and we have never worked in the way that it's an H-1B versus offshore versus onshore issue. We have always had a culture matching the best skills for the client and skills are not just technology skills but also human skills.

Q: Has there been any change in the way you negotiate or structure deals with your clients in the last couple of years? 

A: I think we have a very full scale and robust portfolio. People always kind of dissect that question, about if there is always going to be a different kind of contractual piece. Even in the last decade, we have seen things like consumption-based versus time and material-based contacts, but in general, they are the same.

Q: Do you have any internal target? Are you looking at hiring people in the US in the next few years? A: We don't disclose any specific targets but if you look at our trajectory in our past ten years, we opened our first major global delivery center in North Carolina. That gave us momentum and energy. In the last ten years, we have opened up six other global delivery centers in the US alone, and that has created thousands and thousands of jobs.

Just in the last seven years, we have created a digital lab in Frisco, Texas, where we also have a global delivery centre. We've created two new IoT (Internet of Things) labs in the Seattle area.

So if you measure our momentum and trajectory over the last ten years, we don't believe we are going to be slowing down and we feel very optimistic about our market and the value we are bringing to communities all across the land.

Q: There seems to be a lot more focus on mode 2 and mode 3 services understandably. But how are you looking at mode 1 part of the business and how is a deal structured along Mode 1-2-3?

A: There is always a tendency to talk about things that are popular in the industry. Mode 2 and 3 tend to be spoken about more but mode 1 is the bread and butter of every corporate and government institution around the planet in every industry- from finance to telecom, healthcare and manufacturing, retail or consumer packaged goods.

The core bedrock of being able to even have conversations about digitalising operations, implementing AI, is a stable, robust and thriving IT infrastructure backbone. You must have applications which make things come together and help transport data and light up the information economy.

We are also very strong in the engineering services segment. Many people look at both IT services and engineering separately, but we bring both those capabilities to the customers. That gives us the ability to impact all the way from a customer's R&D cycle to delivery to their own customers and the marketplace.

Q: Would it be fair to say that the whole offshore, onshore conversation is now redundant? Is H-1B no longer an issue that you see as big or significant? A: I think it's always going to be a technical or logistics issue but our real focus, especially with clients, is in and around the outcome and the best mix of skills and mind to get the work done.

It's about having the right blend of engineering skills, leadership skills, computer science skills and people skills. And that is also very critical to have people who can think and be creative. So, for us, it's never been about one or the other. It's been about the best mix of talent and a mix of IQ and EQ (emotional quotient) related skills.