Trump Administration offers tremendous opportunities: Infosys chief Vishal Sikka

The Trump Administration is business-friendly and entrepreneurial, and the new American government offers tremendous opportunities to do innovative work, says Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka.

"We see a tremendous opportunity to do innovative work. The (Trump) administration is a very business administration, a very entrepreneurial administration," Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka told PTI in an interview as he refuted reports that the Indian IT companies are facing challenges under the Trump Administration.

"I don't feel that way," he said in response to the question during a wide-ranging interview.

"As long as we can continue to focus on innovation, on value delivery in the new areas, I think things will be okay. So IT is more and more as that. The underlying skills issue, the...Making sure that the workforce is something that is frontier of the future," he said.

Sikka said the Trump Administration is taking steps to improve the atmosphere of doing business in the US.

"If you look at the, some of the regulated industries like banking or pharma, the emphasis has clearly shifted from valuably compliant towards innovative areas, new R&D, new adoption of financial services, new adoption of technologies for faster trading, better trading, better derivative analysis," he said.

"Areas like that, rather than a lot of spending that used to go into regulatory compliance...In the US we notice a shift in these priorities towards innovative areas and so on," said the Infosys CEO.

According to Sikka, Indian IT companies have a bright future in the US.

"Definitely (Indian IT companies have a bright future). We have to be aligned to the future, we have to be aware of the changes that are happening around us. We have to sense and understand and respond to those by building in the software, the services, the capabilities for the future," he said.

"And if we do that, then I am confident that we will be relevant, we will able to thrive and this is precisely what Infosys is doing," Sikka said.

Indian IT companies, he noted, have made extraordinary progress in the last three and half decades.

"What has got us here has worked extraordinarily well. It has created an enormous success in the last three and a half decades. But this is not what is going to get us forward. We need to continue our core values of education, of learning, of what the future is," he said.

"What I find after my three years of experience (in Infosys), is that the youth in India is ready for that (change). It is ready to embrace that. It is ready to be entrepreneurial, to be innovative.

"I find that one of the big challenges is to make sure that the people in senior management and so forth also understand what needs to be done and that the transformation of our processes the transformation of our mechanics, our systems, to support that future reality. That has to also happen," Sikka said.

And that is not easy, he acknowledged.

"That is a very challenging thing to do. I mean, transformation in general is a very challenging thing to do. And especially in our case, where our core business is under a margin pressure. It is exceedingly important to get that right," he said.