I deal with technologies to understand from the perspective of talent and the economy

Bijay Sahoo, Group President-Strategic HR, Chairman's Office, Reliance Industries Limited

“Throughout my career, I have worked for different technology companies; I started with a banking company - IDBI Bank, which in those days boasted of being online completely, and then I worked for PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), a multinational consulting company that deal with technologies, before joining Wipro. Then I started working with Reliance Retail, which itself was founded on the foundation of technologies, and then moved to Jio Infocomm that initially started with 4G, before going into multiple businesses like 5G and eCommerce.

So, I deal with technologies to understand from the perspective of the talent and the economy. During my days in Wipro, I recall it was the dot com era and all the IT services companies of this country used to have the highest market cap and value creation. From 2000 to 2005, Wipro was the highest market cap company in this country and Azim Premji in 2000 June was the second richest billionaire in the world. So, while the net worth of Bill Gates was $48 billion, Premji’s was $37.8 billion. Larry Ellison’s was something like $37 billion and Warren Buffett’s happened to be much lower. 

Also, most of the IT companies, except for IBM that was founded in 1960s, were started around the same time. Companies like Microsoft, Cisco, and Apple started between 1970s and 1980s. Similarly, in India, TCS, Wipro, Infosys, all of them started in that same time frame, during the 1980’s (though Wipro was started in 1945, it shifted its focus to IT and computing in the 1980s). During that time, the application layer of technologies was the emerging technology and whosoever was doing products like Microsoft, were actually productizing applications and then selling it and getting huge value out of that. In 2000, the market cap of Microsoft was very high, somewhere around $600 Billion. Today, just like Nvidia with $2 trillion is growing the fastest in terms of market cap, similarly in those days Microsoft used to grow the fastest.

Microsoft did struggle, if you remember, when Steve Ballmer was the CEO, and the market cap slashed to $300 or $400 billion. And then when Satya Nadella took over the reins and started adopting and looking at new frontiers of technologies (like he started Azure - the cloud computing platform, he acquired LinkedIn), Microsoft went back to nearly $2 - $3 trillion market cap. 

Apple has always been the most innovative in terms of the products, as they had the combination of hardware and software. And they remained the leader for quite some time because of their product quality and the demand they are able to create all over the world with the novelty of the product they come up with.

In India, Wipro was the fastest growing IT services company. Infosys was younger to Wipro but was almost coming at par. TCS was not listed, but it was also growing. These companies saw the growth as a result of the IT boom.
In 2012-14, McKinsey came with one research paper where they talked about 12 emerging technologies like AI/ Machine Learning, IoT, 3D printing, advanced robotics, cloud computing, and they said it will create $30 trillion value when the global GDP was $70 trillion. The world's GDP today is over $100 trillion.

While in Wipro, we used to identify emerging technologies based on Gartner and Forrester reports and we started creating Centre of Excellence (COEs). When Y2K was getting over, Application development and maintenance was actually our biggest business. But had we done only application development maintenance, it would have been a very small company, probably $200 to $300 million company. But then in 2000, we started five COEs – Package Implementation (which now looks trivial and getting redundant) in the SAP system, Oracle PeopleSoft applications for meeting business requirements, i2 for supply chain, Siebel for CRM (which eventually got merged to another company). Wipro became a multibillion dollar company because of adopting those five technologies.

The advent of Facebook in 2008-2009 marked the starting of a new era. It was the era of SMACS - Social Media, Mobility, Analytics, Cloud computing and Security. So, whosoever entered into any of these five areas, those businesses actually grew the fastest in the next four-five years. Facebook, if you remember, gave us a slogan -  Mobile First. Even Flipkart adopted the mobile first approach. But unfortunately, mobile connectivity was not as strong as it is today. And thanks to Jio, it made mobile the strongest in terms of usages because of broadband.

So, in every seven - eight years, new emerging technologies keep coming in. In 2014, when McKinsey talked about the top emerging 12 technologies, the companies that have been most benefited are the companies who adopted these technologies. Today, the success lies in how fast a business is able to adopt or invest in new technologies.”