Roshni Nadar Malhotra

About

Even before entering the HCL group in 2008 as a full-timer, Roshni Nadar Malhotra remembers spending the summers at the company’s manufacturing facility in Puducherry, its offices in Chennai and the business school internship with HCL tech teams in California. She credits all these for her journey within the group, finally culminating in her taking over as HCL Corp’s CEO in 2009. “I think when he [Shiv Nadar] was thinking of me, though the chair came much later, he perhaps [thought] I belonged better on a board,” Roshni says while talking about her father and founder of HCL group, Shiv Nadar, for his vision. Having spent a considerable amount of time interacting with C. VijayaKumar, CEO and MD of HCLTech, in her role as the vice chair before being appointed as the chairperson of India’s third-largest IT services firm in 2020, Roshni credits the company’s industry leading revenue growth to the team. She believes having a smaller board helps in faster and easier communication with the management, resulting in faster decision-making. “I think, just having a more focussed strategic vision, which aligns both ways, and putting in some more parameters, which I think are important even from a market perspective, sort of helped in focussing the way we want to grow,” she adds. As AI takes the tech industry by storm and HCLTech’s annualised advanced AI revenue nears $620 million, Roshni says what is working in the company’s favour is an all-weather portfolio, with engineering, digital and cloud, software and AI—leading to newer revenue streams translating from physical AI—and more of outcome-based models. “It’s easier when you’re not broad, but you’re deep, because you’re able to mine some of the customers that you have much better… you are able to have those conversations. We have built a certain relationship and trust over a period of time. So, some of that becomes really important,” she says.