For Mphasis, FY18 wired as growth year: CEO Nitin Rakesh

IT services firm Mphasis, owned by private equity giant Blackstone, appointed Nitin Rakesh as the new chief executive in January to push growth at the beleaguered firm. It announced its fourth quarter results on Saturday, which saw net profit drop by 3.4% on-quarter. In an interview with ET, the CEO speaks about how Mphasis is wiring for growth in FY18, life after acquisition from HPE, leveraging Blackstone portfolio companies as a hunting ground for business and the new partnership with DXC to fast track delivering solutions to its clients.

Three months on since you came in, what's the positioning of Mphasis?
We are wiring the business for growth. We are doing that in partnership with promoter-shareholder Blackstone, with the former shareholder and with our market facing teams and existing clients. We are looking at every relationship which we have as an opportunity for growth and are executing that as well. This is the year for HP to be back in growth. FY 17 was about stabilisation of the HP relationship. The curve flattened last three-quarters. We had some marginal growth in Q3 from HP - which is first in 20 quarters. Q4 was flat and the expectation is for the trajectory to start picking up. FY18 is wired as the growth year which will be a change from the past.

As CEO, have you set any specific targets for yourself?
You can set lofty goals for 3 years out and 5 years out, in the end it's about execution and strategy. Our strategy is starting to become very clear as to where our mind share is and that is --helping customers transform their application landscape, helping them continue to work with getting closer to their end customers with consumer-facing technology. If this is backed by cloud, automation and cognitive, so be it. We have so much opportunity in what we already have. If we just execute on that, and not really focus on what really happens in one large segment of our business, we change the equation.

How are you working with Blackstone?
Blackstone is the largest PE company in the world which has about 80 companies in their PE portfolio. This is where we fit in. Blackstone portfolio is an opportunity for us, we have already got multiple wins in that portfolio just in the last 90 days and we have started executing on that in a focused and programmatic manner. Collectively these companies represent about $1.5 - $ 2 billion of IT spend, this is the hunting ground where we are hunting.

We have obviously cut these by industry segment and type of service and identified the first 10-20 companies we choose to concentrate on. I don't want to be spraying and praying. It's a very focused programmatic approach. Of course, there is the introduction and relationship element which is obviously why we are talking to them, to begin with. I think our programmatic approach will take the introduction to a conversion. Because we come in as a familiar company which belongs to the group it gives up a leg up in fast-tracking the process. We have closed 4 deals in the past 3 months and it's not fair to assume every 3 months we'll have four though. Other good thing in this list is very dynamic list. There are companies Blackstone invests and disinvest from and we are talking to companies which Blackstone had preciously held, but don't hold any more. A few they invested in a couple of months ago. Hence, it's a dynamic list and our list is also dynamic.

Is Mphasis poised for growth? How will partnership with DXC help?
For us FY17 or FY16 is not a benchmark. Two major changes happened to us in FY17: Promoter shareholder change which was announced at the beginning and executed at the middle of the year. Then, it's management reset which happened in end of Q3. Blackstone portfolio is an opportunity for us. We announced a partnership with DXC. We have multiple engines of growth within DXC -- we have got HPE, HPI, DXC itself. What used to be one large block of an execution partnership is very much focused on being a solutions partner. We will hopefully be at the front end of a lot transformation on all things cloud and application migration. I had already said that there were "hidden jewels" in the HP family. This itself was a hidden jewel within us, now we are surfacing those and expanding them, shinning them and stitching them together in a set of capabilities and solutions.