Cognizant Leaders Discuss the Company’s Vision and Growth Outlook for Malaysia and the Region

(From right): Santosh Thomas, Executive Vice President, CEMEA and APAC, and Jayajyoti Sengupta, Vice President and APAC Head, Cognizant

On April 28, 2016, Cognizant expanded its presence in Malaysia with the opening of a new delivery center in Cyberjaya, Kuala Lumpur. Following the inauguration, Santosh Thomas, Executive Vice President, CEMEA and APAC, and Jayajyoti Sengupta, Vice President and APAC Head, Cognizant, interacted with the media. 

Speaking with Computerworld Malaysia, Jayajyoti Sengupta said, “As well as serving global, local and regional clients, Cognizant will be able to deliver deep local insights and time zone advantages to the company’s growing roster of customers in Asia. Over time, Malaysia will serve as a proximity delivery center for the APAC/ASEAN region.”

He said, “Cognizant is growing rapidly in Malaysia and is committed to continuing its expansion in the country. Within a short span of time, the company has added a full range of application and IT infrastructure services to its portfolio of services delivered from Malaysia. While growing its presence in the country, Cognizant Malaysia will also continue to drive expertise in areas such as digital, analytics and information management, and consulting, to name a few. The new center marks an important milestone in our mission to leverage the best talent globally.”

Sengupta said Malaysia “has scaled up rapidly as an IT and BPO destination, and offers high talent employability and scalability. There is good untapped potential for Malaysia to move up the value chain. The country is well-equipped to deliver a wide range of IT services, especially in the areas of IT infrastructure services, remote infrastructure management services (RIMS), application and business process services (in particular, captive shared-service operations in financial services, logistics, and the energy sector) of relatively high quality. In addition, it holds great promise to deliver digital transformation, mobility, datawarehousing and analytics, and information management services to regional and global clients.”

He said Cognizant will develop partnerships with the academia in Malaysia. “[This will help] in bridging the gap between the available labour pool and the employable talent pool for IT and BPO opportunities. Some of the critical steps towards this end include skills benchmarking/augmentation and qualitative enhancements in the educational system.”

He added, “A global service provider such as Cognizant can help by providing opportunities to expand to cutting-edge service offerings such as digital transformation. We are here in Malaysia to not merely hire talent from the lateral market, build talent, but to recruit STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) graduates and turn them into software professionals of global standards. We are committed to building the required ecosystem in Malaysia.”

He said, “We remain committed to building our Graduate Recruitment Program (GRP) in Malaysia targeting Malaysia’s top-tier technical and business schools. In 2015, we launched our M2ASH (Monolingual, Multiskilled, Automation and Shared Services) program for entry level hires in Malaysia. These hires come with bachelor’s degrees in computer science, computer engineering, and information technology, and represent a broad range of institutions, including University of Liverpool, University Technical Malaysia Malacca, University of Selangor, International Islamic University of Malaysia, University Tenaga Nasional, and University Technology Mara. Those trainees who have successfully completed their training under M2ASH have already been deployed to projects.”

“Cognizant is aiming to tap into the fast-growing Asia-Pacific market by setting up a delivery centre in Malaysia,” reports The Edge, Malaysia.

“We believe the Asian market has the potential to grow faster, including Malaysia,” said Santosh Thomas. He added that this was a good time in technology, as it had moved from a support function to become an enabler of strategy. “There isn’t a single boardroom today that is not worried about what technology can do for them, but what they are not doing, which will enable competition to do what they are doing,” he added.

Sengupta said the company believed that Asia had huge potential for growth given that the companies were now more ready to embrace digital transformation as they had no legacy issues. He explained that companies elsewhere had invested millions in their legacy and they would have to consider their legacy before moving on to another new technology. In comparison, companies in Asia would have no restriction when it came to embracing new IT. “We have a large component of consulting businesses, we have traditional IT services, we have digital component, which is slowly gaining momentum and becoming more mainstream,” Sengupta said. He added that recent developments on the legislation on intellectual property and data protection in Malaysia and the region also provided growth opportunities for Cognizant.

In a conversation with DSA (Data & Storage ASEAN), Santosh Thomas expressed a vision for the Kuala Lumpur center to not only cater to the country or the region, but evolve into a league of its own and become known for certain specialist services, catering to the world.  

He said the company believed that technology had matured in Malaysia and locally there was a strong talent pool with not only good skills, but also the right attitude. He said he had had an extremely positive experience with the local talent. “Skills are critical, but even more important is the attitude. Skills can be replaceable but attitude cannot be replaced; and in Malaysia we see a can-do attitude, an inquisitive learning mind and a hunger for innovation. We are looking for a balance in attitude and skills.”

“All industries have significant untapped potential. We are seeing significant investment in digital space. But it’s not all about writing apps, it’s about how to be digital, how can we use data,” added Sengupta.

When asked if the region had the physical infrastructure required to support demand, Thomas said that was not a cause for concern. Asia, he averred, had an advantage over some of the more developed regions. “In terms of infrastructure, there are more cloud storage users rather that legacy mainframe in the region. We also see much more innovation and risk-taking in Asia. The comparative lack of legacy infrastructure means the region can take quantum leaps in terms of technology. Looking at the region, the uptake and usage of mobile phones and applications is already very high.”

Thomas added, “Innovation is about what you do with what you have, not looking at what you don’t have.” He noted that it was not purely about technology and advancements; the people and businesses had to be in sync for progress to happen. He explained that digital shouldn’t be just a strategy; it’s an overarching theme, and both strategy and technology implementation have to happen together.