Finance is critical. If sufficient investment is made in infrastructure and venture capital is made available, there will be a big improvement in the situation.
Clients do not expect the infrastructure to be any less reliable just because the service is being delivered from an offshore location; thus, the uptime requirements justify the expense.
Today we're focused on small acquisitions to add technology where necessary. I think it's fair to say we're not out looking for a large one, but I think it's also very fair to say that as a public company you can never say never.
As I said before, a big part of my strategy says - and the management team I think is in agreement with this - we don't have to be out there with a lot of noise all the time. What we need to do is paint a vision for customers, promise them deliverables, and go hit at it.
Companies are starting to measure how effective their customer service is and trying to understand what they can do to improve the customer service process.
It didn't make a lot of sense for us to be doing Lotus Notes implementations.
That's a very critical phase in customer service because you can start to really understand what part of customer service has value to customers and what part is bothering customers.
Clearly, every company needs a leader. That's an important part of being the CEO of the company.
I have a high degree of confidence about India's growth potential in IT.
I think that a lot of companies are still amazingly price sensitive.
I'm equally comfortable in getting out there and taking a stand when I have to take a stand.
I'm very comfortable in having a strong team. I'm very comfortable in sharing the limelight with the team.
One, we committed to put about 650 people in the field to focus totally on customer satisfaction.
We have believed at CA that consolidation of this industry is something that was required ten years ago.
Some story appears in some newspaper that says that somebody said X, Y, and Z, and a customer says, I don't understand what they're talking about - we're running that product, we've been using it for five years, what are they talking about?
But the real focus should be on people who are buying today because the base is so big it will take a long time for any change materialize on an overall basis.
Few service industries are designed to be 24x7 in India, and thus there was no 24x7 mentality.
And I'm comfortable being who I am, so I think a lot of people who take over from a founder worry about how they compare to the founder; I worry about doing the best I can.
So it's really for us about new products, because we have released a lot of new products.
There is nothing in the company that is either above or below me, as far as I'm concerned.
So let's say you're using XYZ product and you want to do something very sophisticated. You subscribe to this thing, you hit a button, and a CA expert pops up in video.
To me, it's really important to drive change through a team because one person, while the buck has to stop with somebody, the company is just too big for one person.
There are companies that are cutting their costs by over 50% by offshoring.
There is an increasing trend to have the call center representative portray the same image that the company is out there marketing.
Well, if you look back, in almost two and a half years, the biggest change probably was in late 2000 when we decided to totally change the CA business model.
Well, the security business has been growing. I think security is one of those areas where it's to some degree not linear but maybe exponential growth.
Finally, I have to say that the most surprising aspect has been the speed at which the folks in India adapt to Western practices. They learn fast, really, really fast.
We will announce a new offering, where you can get a CA expert on your PC live, via video, on a range of topics about a product.
Often, the client will have unrealistic goals that the vendor will feel the need to agree to, even though the vendor has no ability to deliver.
India has the unique advantages of having the biggest domestic market and this should support IT companies.