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Business News/ Companies / News/  Razorfish’s Scott Sorokin to head Infosys’s digital push
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Razorfish’s Scott Sorokin to head Infosys’s digital push

Hiring comes at a time when rivals claim to generate a large share of business from disruptive technologies

Sorokin’s appointment puts a spotlight on the tectonic shift in the way India’s older and larger software firms do business. Photo: Hemant Mishra/MintPremium
Sorokin’s appointment puts a spotlight on the tectonic shift in the way India’s older and larger software firms do business. Photo: Hemant Mishra/Mint

Bengaluru: Infosys Ltd has hired Scott Sorokin, the former chief strategy officer of digital ad firm Razorfish (part of French advertising firm Publicis Groupe SA) to head its digital business.

The move comes at a time when the country’s software services firms are trying to help their clients, ranging from top banks to giant retailers across the globe, develop better apps, analyse data effectively, and manage their customers better.

Sorokin joined Infosys last week, according to an executive familiar with the matter.

The executive did not want to be named as he is not authorized to talk to reporters.

Sorokin, who quit Razorfish in January, has already updated his LinkedIn profile and lists his current designation as Global Head of Digital at Infosys. The profile says, Sorokin has been “instrumental in helping brands navigate the complex digital landscape of mobile, social, search and data".

Infosys Digital has about 15,000 employees, and it caters to 1,045 clients across five industries, including banking and finance, oil and gas, and retail, the executive said.

Infosys chief executive officer Vishal Sikka has until now shied away from sharing details of the revenue the company gets from helping its clients build better social or mobile platforms, improve their data analytics or move to cloud-computing platforms—together called SMAC, or Digital.

According to executives at the firm, Infosys currently gets only about 8% of its revenue from the digital space. That translates to about $700 million (about 4,760 crore) a year on the basis of the company’s revenue for the year ended 31 March 2015 and about $193 million on the basis of Infosys’s revenue for three months ended 31 December 2015.

Sorokin faces the mammoth task of shoring up Infosys’s digital business at a time when some of its larger rivals claim to generate a significantly large share of business from these disruptive technologies.

Mumbai-based Tata Consultancy Services Ltd (TCS) said its digital arm accounted for 13.7% of $4.14 billion in revenue (or $567 million) in the October-December 2015 period.

But things will get better for Infosys, experts said, underlining that Sorokin’s appointment is a step in the right direction.

“By hiring Scott, Infosys is signalling to the broader talent pool that it’s serious in making a commitment to digital and an agency approach," said Ray Wang, founder, Constellation Research Inc., a technology research and advisory firm. “One can expect a number of folks from the former Razorfish organization to join Scott as well."

Reports in publications like AdWeek have alluded to uncertainty at Razorfish following its 2015 merger with another Publicis agency, Rosetta, which is a data marketing specialist.

Infosys Digital was until now overseen by Suryaprakash K., whose new role within the company is not clear.

A spokeswoman for the company declined to comment, and Suryaprakash did not respond to an email seeking comment.

One reason behind Sikka’s reluctance to quantify the business from the digital space is because of the fuzzy way each IT vendor defines SMAC.

For instance, Wipro Ltd has its cloud-computing platform and analytics arm outside of Wipro Digital, which also focuses on opportunities from the Internet of Things.

Accenture Plc. clubs revenues from cyber security in digital. Its revenue from other digital, cloud and security services totaled 40% of revenue in the quarter ended November 2015.

Domestic information technology (IT) firms generate much of their revenue from managing IT infrastructure or from software engineers writing code for applications that help their clients run their business.

Global companies, from retail behemoth Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to banking giant Citigroup Inc., are now looking at their technology vendors to not only manage their technology infrastructure more efficiently but also to help them better engage with their customers. Many are also moving their ad dollars from traditional media, such as print, to the web, pushing more IT firms to chase the opportunity in the digital world.

For all these reasons, Sorokin’s appointment puts a spotlight on the tectonic shift in the way India’s older and larger software firms do business.

From TCS to Wipro, to even smaller outsourcing firms such as Mindtree Ltd, many are stitching partnerships with the cloud-computing firms such as Amazon Web Services or using data analytics. They are hiring more data scientists, building intelligent data-crunching platforms and acquiring firms focused on new-age technologies.

While Infosys bought US mobile e-commerce firm Skava for $120 million last year to device newer ways to help retailers boost sales, Wipro spent $95 million to buy Danish design firm Designit, which claims to have been founded on the principle of user-centric approach of design thinking.

Some experts see the recent moves by domestic IT firms in embracing new-age technologies as more of a catch-up exercise than anything else.

“It might be big for Indian IT vendors, but they are lagging their global peers," said Thomas Reuner, managing director for IT outsourcing research at HfS Research. “Digital transformation is in the eye of the beholder. The industry is still struggling with the narrative as to what this transformation entails. Beyond semantics or definitions, in the context of revenue, the key aspect is to decouple routine service delivery from labour."

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Varun Sood
Varun Sood is a business journalist writing on corporate affairs for the last fifteen years. He also writes a weekly newsletter, TWICH+ on the largest technology services companies. He is based in Bangalore. Varun's first book, Azim Premji: The Man Beyond the Billions, was brought out by HarperCollins in October 2020.
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Published: 10 Feb 2016, 06:21 PM IST
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