Phil Fersht — CEO and Chief Analyst, HFS Research[00:22]
Welcome, everybody. This is Phil Fersht. I’m the CEO and Chief Analyst at HFS Research, and today I’m very happy to have an old friend and a real industry veteran — I use that word in a positive sense — in Venu Lambu, who is now the designate CEO for LTIMindtree. So I’m really happy to have you join us today, Venu, and I’d love to hear a bit more about you and the path that has you leading this $4.5 billion services powerhouse.
Venu Lambu — Designate CEO, LTIMindtree[01:01]
Thank you, Phil, and, you know, nice to be here. Thanks for having me on this conversation.
Phil Fersht — CEO and Chief Analyst, HFS Research[01:01]
Tell me a bit about your background and what kind of influenced you along the way to end up doing what you’re doing now.
Venu Lambu — Designate CEO, LTIMindtree[01:01]
You know, it’s very interesting. It does look like a long time back when I started my career, but you know how this works in the technology business — things move very fast, and you’ve already counted thirty years-plus that I’ve been in this industry. You know what, interestingly, I started with a company called Digital Equipment Corporation. Not sure how many people remember that company now. It used to be a Boston-based tech company which used to manufacture all those big Alpha systems and PDP-11s and so on, much before enterprise computing got shrunk down with more power. That’s the time when I started my career, and now if I just look back at how things moved from there to client-server computing, to cloud computing — now we’re talking about the world of AI. So it’s been an exciting journey, I would say, and I’ve been very fortunate that I could navigate and learn through this process of different technology evolution that happened over the last three decades.
Phil Fersht — CEO and Chief Analyst, HFS Research[02:16]
Well, I remember the DEC-Compaq merger — that was one of the first things I had to write about as an analyst. So tell us a bit about your business philosophy and why you think you’re the right man for this job at this time.
Venu Lambu — Designate CEO, LTIMindtree[02:34]
You know, firstly, I’ve been very fortunate to be back in LTIMindtree, to be back amongst the friends with whom I worked for many years, and back among the teams which I believe are one of the best in the industry. And I’ve been fortunate enough to lead that team. This is an interesting time, as you would know, Phil, in the industry, right? We’re at a very strategic inflection point. And this is a time where we have an opportunity to make some good choices and not go into the race to the bottom — instead, use this opportunity to reinvent, remodel our businesses and get prepared for the huge opportunity that lies ahead, especially in the context of AI, which I’ll share my views on subsequently. So the very fact that we are at a stage of challenging ourselves, relooking at our business models and doing that — that’s precisely what I believe I’m good at. I’ve been leading business transformation at different stages of inflection point, so yeah, that’s what I feel the board selected me to come back and lead this organization. And again, it’s not just about me, it’s about working with my team, and some fantastic leadership team that I have, to navigate this.
Phil Fersht — CEO and Chief Analyst, HFS Research[04:00]
So you mentioned smart choices, avoiding a race to the bottom. Looking deeper into that, what specific market problems are you trying to solve, if you want to make these smart choices?
Venu Lambu — Designate CEO, LTIMindtree[04:16]
Yeah, sure. Look, over the years we built a lot of capabilities across different practices, but all of them were mandated towards how do we make IT efficient, how do we make operations more predictable, how do we use technology as an enabler to get time to market and speed and the other aspects of competitiveness to the business. And we’ve done that pretty well over the last few decades, right? One of the biggest aspects that actually helped us propel these capabilities to our customers was the global delivery model. And the global delivery model inherently gave a cost advantage, inherently gave the arbitrage advantage, to propose all these propositions. But I guess now the context has changed, right? So there is a big challenge that’s happening on the existing services and existing capability model. So that’s the first aspect of it. And the second big contextual change that has happened with our enterprises is, you know, our clients are actually looking to solve very large productivity problems, right? So how can they unlock productivity at the enterprise level? It’s not just about unlocking the productivity at the IT level, which is fairly table stakes and given — we’ve done it many times before — but I think now the interesting part is we can actually have an opportunity to unlock productivity at a wider enterprise. And that’s really the most exciting phase of change, as I see it, in the industry.
Phil Fersht — CEO and Chief Analyst, HFS Research[05:49]
Now, how do we do this? Is it a little bit of — let’s just sell some higher-risk deals and figure this out with the clients? Because I remember back to the old initial offshore deals with, you know, BP and Andersen Consulting and PwC back in the day, and they were deals which were sort of front-loaded with ‘let’s do this and then transform.’ Is that the way, or do you have another plan?
Venu Lambu — Designate CEO, LTIMindtree[06:19]
You know, I sort of look at this as two playbooks, Phil, right? Playbook one is about how can we — considering our maturity and competencies and our ability to manage risk on the traditional services — how can we start committing more productivity gains to our customers? Whether we front-load them or do it over the contract life cycle is a matter of detailing in that particular engagement, but our ability to deliver productivity for the IT-related services is something we have a high level of maturity on, and we know how to manage those risks. So that’s playbook one. And for that we’re infusing AI into all our practices, so that it becomes a default way of doing business. The second playbook is actually about slightly expanding the canvas, right? It’s not just about bringing the best of the agentic AI models; it’s also about making sure that the business process on which the agentic AI actually runs can be transformed. So can we relook at redesigning the blueprint of certain business processes on which you can run your agents? That’s where I like your philosophy of services-as-software — that’s where you start creating the services construct in the form of an agentic world and transform the business process. That one is going to be on a learning curve because it’s at the early stage of evolution, and that’s where we need to slightly demonstrate a better risk appetite and put our chips on the table to get those engagements going with our customers — which I’m sure will mature with time at a much faster pace than probably we saw in the earlier revolutions.
Phil Fersht — CEO and Chief Analyst, HFS Research[08:04]
Right. And do you think the biggest challenge is convincing customers to view you differently, to say, hey, start viewing us like a solutions business and less of an effort-based business? Is that the biggest challenge — to change the perception of service providers in general from customers — or do you think customers are more open-minded now to take bigger risks and look at different ways of doing things?
Venu Lambu — Designate CEO, LTIMindtree[08:13]
There is that battle of perception that needs to be managed, but there is enough credibility and enough historical experience that can be leveraged, as I see it, to actually manage this perception, right? And we have done that — when we were working through the classical good old ERP transformation, we were the companies who actually helped the clients transform their business processes. We did the same thing when the front end needed to be enhanced and a different client experience needed to be enhanced through Salesforce. We came through the SaaS world, the phase of SaaS, and the phase of traditional enterprise apps — we actually demonstrated that, right? So now it’s another opportunity to sort of leverage those trends back and start positioning ourselves into the new AI world.
Phil Fersht — CEO and Chief Analyst, HFS Research[09:23]
Yeah. And, you know, talking about veterans and when we started out — back in the day, you weren’t a CIO until you’d had an SAP or an Oracle rollout on your resume, and you were dying to get up and talk about it to the world, and how you did it and what worked, what didn’t work. Why is it that with AI transformation, everybody is so — everything is suddenly so top secret and no one wants to talk about it?
Venu Lambu — Designate CEO, LTIMindtree[09:47]
Yeah, I’m not sure whether it’s about a secrecy issue, Phil. Probably it’s a bit of a fuzziness that is there in the narrative in the market, and that creates a bit of a fuzziness both on the expectations from the client side and also on the service provider side in actually defining what is AI, right? There’s a bit of washing of AI happening on the classical programs that you write. So I think we have a job, both as a provider and a partner, and along with our partner ecosystem, to start defining very sharply what we call AI services. You call it AI and you end up doing some T&M engagement with 10 people, 20 people, and call this engagement AI. For me, it is not, right? So I think AI should push the envelope in the way we engage with customers, we should push the envelope in terms of managing the outcomes for our customers, and most importantly, there has to be a measurable outcome on how you actually impacted the productivity area, right? The impact value becomes very critical. So if you start measuring that impact value, I think the definitions get sharper.
Phil Fersht — CEO and Chief Analyst, HFS Research[10:58]
I think we’re starting to see a certain mindset shift amongst a smaller proportion of enterprises, but it is happening. And the three things that really came out of some recent roundtables we’re doing are the three things that are really impacting our customers: customer experience, employee experience with AI — so making your employees feel positive, feel motivated, feel part of this and not feel threatened and fearful; having it impact your customers directly and more profitably; and then the third area is measuring AI. I think it should be measured from profitability, not necessarily productivity. How profitable is this? How are we actually becoming more competitive? How are we using this to do things at lower cost, higher profit, higher productivity, that sort of thing? But bearing this in mind, when you look at what you’d like people to say about LTIMindtree, what would you like to hear in a year’s time as to why I’d want to go with these guys versus this other company?
Venu Lambu — Designate CEO, LTIMindtree[11:59]
We as a company have navigated a lot of these technological changes that came our way. In fact, we navigated very successfully when we transitioned to the other side — even when we were two separate entities, L&T and Mindtree, each of them went through those changes, and combined together we are much more powerful now, right, to sort of manage the inflection point that we’re navigating. So what I would love to establish is to increase our relevance to our customer, and that’s a message I tell to my teams as well. Look, it’s not about what’s the wallet share in an account, right? That’s more of a byproduct. What’s my relevance factor with the clients? Especially when the conversation is about unlocking the productivity at the enterprise level, translating that into pure profit dollars for our customers, or increasing the revenue for our customers, or reinventing their business model — there is an interesting relationship factor which I believe will become important, and I would love to champion that, which is what I call the relevance factor.
Phil Fersht — CEO and Chief Analyst, HFS Research[12:49]
Yeah, very good. I can’t end this interview without a quick question around navigating our geopolitical environment right now, which clearly dominates everybody’s thinking — and we look forward to hearing you at our summit next month as well talking about this. But navigating risks and opportunities right now, what are the opportunities, what are the risks, Venu? Is there anything that you can share with our audience on what you’re looking to apply?
Venu Lambu — Designate CEO, LTIMindtree[13:43]
Look, I think the risk is obviously an unknown risk, because we’re dealing with a lot of variability happening within a very short window of time, and that’s a bit unprecedented, I would say. Usually it’s an event that brings this kind of variability in a short window of time — we saw that during the pandemic, right, and we saw this during the financial crisis. It’s an event that happened, it sort of did that. So here we’re dealing with a very prolonged duration of business variability, or the macroeconomic changes that are happening too frequently, too soon. So the best thing that we can do is to be very close to our customer, do our best proactively to solve their problems.
Phil Fersht — CEO and Chief Analyst, HFS Research[14:33]
That’s very good, and you’re right, the risk is unknown, but the opportunities are to get closer to customers. So, I think, Venu, thank you very much for your time today. It’s been terrific hearing from you, and best of luck with the new role and the company direction. Look, it’d be great to have you in New York next month. Look forward to it very much.
Venu Lambu — Designate CEO, LTIMindtree[15:00]
Thank you, Phil. Great talking to you. Thank you.
