Q.1 What efforts are being put to stay relevant in this lock down period?
We are engaging with our customers with the intentions to ensure that they are safe and what their support needs will be in this environment. Since businesses are in lock down and some of their colleagues are working from home, if they need any support or not and they are being given by our Technical Support personnel
Q.2 How relevant is work from home for the IT Industry?
While we had some amounts of work from home being practised in our company before the Covid scenario, as we deal with multiple countries and time zones from the India office, this situation taught us how to adjust to the same. In the initial few days, some our colleagues had some internet connectivity issues, which got resolved and I would say that our colleagues have adjusted well with the work from home. We were able to complete many backend projects where our software development team was working and in some cases, productivity was better than earlier months; while in some customer facing environments, since we were unable to get customer feed back quickly, productivity was lower.
Q.3 How different sectors of the economy are bearing the brunt of the corona virus outbreak?
We have customers in more than 75 countries; most countries are affected by the lock down and precautionary measures announced by respective governments. In some countries, due to disruptions of banking and collection infrastructure of our customers, payments of a section of our customers got delayed slightly. We are amazed however that majority of our customers did not see much impact and in fact wanted us to deliver the digital enablement solutions faster. In fact, in one product line, we saw decision making time reduce from an average of 3-4 weeks to less than 1 week, as businesses fast tracked their digital presence upgrades.
Q.4 If work from home suits you then are you interested to give this opportunity to rural areas so they can work from home for your organization?
This is not currently valid for our company, as we have specific trained manpower, who comes from all parts of India. While work for home is a response to the current scenario, we don’t expect this situation to continue for ever.
Q.5 What are the other empowerment possibilities with less resources?
We realized that our colleagues took the challenges very spiritedly and made an honest effort to cope with the situations. Many of our colleagues lack a separate room which can act as their home office and have children who are doing their school on digital medium. So while they have infrastructure challenges, they honestly made efforts to complete their works and remain online along with their team mates.
Q.6 What is the effect which you face nationally/globally due to Covid19 Virus?
In our IT business, in certain product lines we have seen some effect where enterprises who had confirmed orders, could not install our software and hence those implementations got delayed. However as I mentioned earlier, some product lines have seen good off take in the last 45 days.
Q.7 What is your message for IT Industries?
IT industry has a very good opportunity to serve, as digital enablement of businesses post Covid19 experience is increasing. SO the IT industry should come out with innovative solutions and create right product fit for the businesses, specially for the SME businesses. And this situation will pass soon – so face challenges boldly with innovation and keep all of their colleagues safe.
