Good morning! Welcome to all of you. Today, I thought I will pick a subject which what you are all here for - collaboration.

What I intent talking about is not the recent experiences on collaboration, but the basis of partnership with which HCL has been built, if you take HCL's DNA, the most dominant factor is partnership. I thought I will talk to you about three examples of how this partnership came about. What is partnership to HCL? To HCL, partnership is something I would sum it as a leap of faith. Maybe in future, when I started with Cisco, when we started with Boeing, when we started with IBM, when we started with NEC, when we started with scores of our relationships, we brought that sense of partnership and it takes two to take that leap of faith, sometimes, many more than two. I give you three examples of what we did in partnership and it cuts through the other DNA of HCL which is pioneering. HCL has pioneered many things. I don't want to list all of them to you. You can find it in our literature, but three significant examples, all of them prior to the formation of HCL technologies, I thought that I will describe them to you so that it is interesting. Many of you would not know. Many of you would never get to know but that will describe HCL for you. The first example dates well back. This is after we started shipping the first 8-bit microprocessor-based systems, most people know that two corporations pioneered this worldwide - that is modern computing coming from the mainframe world, when it all opened out into the client-server architecture where the client is a PC. After we, most people know that HCL pioneered it. Along with that we also pioneered some products which in the days of batch processing, we had to input the data and we brought out a product called key-to-mini-floppy drives. In those days we were not good at branding, we called it KTMF, key-to-mini-floppy. In India, we had to bring out another product. Power failures are very common and the rate at which power failures would take place and the voltage fluctuations would take place, most of the times, our computers were bound to breakdown and it would stop. So, we had to build another facility, we called it… you can see how bad marketeers we were, we probably still are, we called it PFAR, power-fail-auto-restart. The data points would go back exactly the same, where it left and then restart all over again. Many of these things are important. Now I will give you, how we put it all together and how it all came up together.

I was discussing a year after this to someone who I met by chance. He was the minister of coal and he was very concerned, he says, India has finally come down to building its own computer but we in the coal fields have something very basic missing. I was interested in knowing more, whether we could help in any nature. Our company, mind you, just one year into shipping the world's first microprocessor-based computers. He said, I am not too sure, how many people we employ. Now for the minister of coal to say this, this is a very big statement. Thirty eight parliamentary constituencies are voted by coal miners of this country even today, so we are talking about the major voters, we don't know how many there are. I asked him, what is that? How do you know that you don't know? By that time, coal had been nationalized in many parts of the world and so was it in India. There were split into eastern coal fields, northern coal fields, central coal fields, western coal fields, and they declared that they will introduce pension, which is a very noble thing to do, because we should see before that it was in very, very poor condition. Socialism thrived on coal mines throughout the world, similarly here. Socialism came up with these coal mines. I said, why should there be a problem? It is a great thing to do. He said but only 80% of the people seem to be registering for pension so there is bound to be problem. We are talking about 1979. We are talking about people, who at that time may not have registered the time of birth, so they can't bring a birth certificate. Later on, he figured that many of them may not have existed in the payrolls at all. There may be something, because, they were all contract labors which came on to payroll. You have got to see through. You really have to go there to see what I am talking about. I said, are you going to just stay with this thought or do you want to do anything about it. He said, if we give you payroll processing, do you think we can get this done. We are talking about much more than four million workers, remember, we don't know the numbers yet, more than four million workers, every Friday, they have to be paid. It is a pretty dangerous job. It is a dangerous job because people could get killed if the amount that is paid is anywhere short or they did not get paid. This is an acid test, whether they were paying the right number of people, whether they were paid or not because if the person's name was missing, it is gone. Somebody is going to lose his life, so when we are talking about something stopping, when we are talking about, you have to be clear about your heartbeat. This is heartbeat issue. You know somebody could lose his heart, literally. These are places, where many times, the electricity is not there. The voltage is very poor, the fluctuations are very large, and we have to write the application, run this and deliver the payroll paper on which they were going to distribute salaries. You know what, the other day, when we were talking, we talked of a very new service, software as a service, solutions as a service. There isn't anything which could be anywhere near touching this. Four to five million people payroll had to be delivered every Friday and we could not miss a heartbeat and this is what we did. We started in 1979 and it was totally our hardware, it was totally our software, it was totally our written application. It was run by our people, payroll delivered. And Friday after Friday, this was done and starting from Western Coalfield we went to Central Coalfield. From Central Coalfield, we went to Eastern Coalfield and then Northern Coalfield and we delivered it everywhere. This is true pioneering of software as a service right in the heart of India where there was hardly any power for people who did not count up at the time in which we started.

What is my learning? What is our learning from HCL from this? It is truly pioneering work. If you see the service offering, it is pioneering work, what we did was pioneering work, the hardware used were all pioneering work and what did the government do to the state. It was a huge leap of faith. To us, on HCL and first till the time it delivered, you know, it was also a nightmarish experience but once we started delivering, we delivered it every Friday. This is one experience I thought I will share with you, this describes HCL.

I'll take the next case where the government, largely the government, you know, those days, we were very, very driven by government, we still probably are. They set about, now we are three years into manufacturing, we are talking about the year 1981. It is okay, computers are being used by the government now pretty widely. The state run corporations, the banks, the life insurance corporations, large corporations, but how do you get computers to be used by the first time users. If this is a second experience, here our partnership really extended to many and these are people who did not speak English and when we did the market research, the market research people, when they came out with the results, I could not believe what they said was true. They said the markets existed in every other street. It existed, we had set up Chandni Chowk. I remember, that was one interview I took. My own Hindi was pretty poor. I had somebody to translate for me. I went to a place called Nai Sadak. Nai Sadak means New Street. Nai Sadak is where the wholesale market of textile existed here. I wanted to hear it for myself because we were going to invest, the marketing…. marketing recommended, marketing people are very brave. They came and recommended the previous year's revenue, 50% of the previous year's revenue to be spent in advertising. They said, we have to advertise very widely. You know, whenever they use this word, we need to advertise very aggressively. I am very afraid of the word. Aggressive means we are going to take a huge risk and we don't know whether the money is going to come back or not that is aggression and the campaign which they came out with is still case history. This was in May 1981 when this was launched. It was a full-page advertisement every single Monday for 12 weeks at a stretch in every major newspaper in this country. Today, there is no way money can buy that kind of quantum of advertisement but at that time, that money was still very big for us. The theme was just one, okay? The theme was "a typist can operate". You know, it is so simple that a typist can operate. Many of them had a typist all right. They may not have spoken English. They had a typist all right. They said if my typist is going to operate this, I am sure anyone could operate this. Now going back into making such a simple solution was very hard, was very, very hard. Because it had to be driven, it had to be a menu driven package if it had to be a 'typist can operate'. When we are selling to so many people, when we are talking to so many people, we had to standardize some form of package. What kind of packages that we could be needing. It could be Inventory Control, it could be Manufacturing, there will be Accounting, it will be Receivable, there will be Payroll, it will be Payables, so we wrote what was called base packages. Can you just go back and think, 1981, a small little company in India was writing the first ERPs of the world and we wrote at that time. You know they still would be here. There is one person who joined the company at that time for this very job was Vaidyanathan RV. You can ask him. He can describe all the details to you. We wrote the first case engineering tools and these were Application Generator. You know, as usual we are very poor in naming any of these things. They were given some code. You know, the ERP package is that we wrote were called Base Packages, because these are the most basic applications to be run, and the Case Tools got slightly better names they were called CAFO, CAMTO, CAPO. You know they were all package generators and form generators, report generators. We made them extremely simple. Someone would just write to us and say that, 'Come and computerize us'. So we charged, which me made through a very well government-supported financing system. An organization called IDBI (Industrial Development Bank of India). They produced a loan system, so the net cost to an organization was Rs.3500, which I think, what, $100, a little less than $100 per month. It is what it cost them finally and we delivered something which a typist could operate on, and it was simply said but behind that were just not the hardware but the earliest of the ERP systems, the first of case engineering tools in the world and these were all driving it all across and the market came rushing in. Pricing according to me was very high. This was a very high margin product. You can imagine that there is an 8-bit processor and a matrix printer is all that we delivered for the kind of money. If I were put the money in perspective for you, at that time, you could have bought a Fiat car for Rs. 10,000, so this is something like 35 to 40 Fiat cars is what was being paid by an entrepreneur or a small trader. The kind of people who came up to buy… I remember, at that time, I used to review every week, the implementation status because it was the kind of people who bought it, Baba Zarda, okay? Baba Zarda, none of you will, that is a product, probably it still exists. It is a form of tobacco. They were big brand and in their place there were no accounts in English. Their accounts were all in Hindi, okay. I happened, I used to go, make it a point to go and meet these people to see that why they bought it. I said, 'Why did you have to buy this, because it is a very expensive product for you.' We cannot give the formula. This is their IPR, this is their formula, the formula of how to make this tobacco, to another person. We will leave it only with four family members, out of them, two are looking after accounts. If these two can be relieved, we can produce twice as much and we can make much more profit than this. It was a central point for them. So finally, we did deliver and there was a place called Hamdard Davakhana. It still exists. It is a big name today. Hamdard Davakhana means it is a medical shop kind of thing. It is Unani medicine. It is an old derivative of Mughal medicine, Islamic medicine which they were selling and here we chased, faced some strangest of problems. All their accounts were in Urdu. How do you make the first master data and then put it into this. We had to first convert all the data in English and then put the master data and then write the menu in Urdu. It was very exiting doing something like this. To the customer, it was huge leap of faith because they handed their accounts to us and we do not know how many people they ever shared those accounts with. Like this, here, so far as HCL is concerned, we implemented it flawlessly across the country. Pioneers in ERP packages, in the process, we also pioneered case tools but in front of them, finally we delivered. It changed the way all of them worked from there on.

I thought this is an interesting way, two examples that described HCL. I will give one more example. There was a time when Vineet was a lot younger and he started doing a project. He asked me, do I get to do anything better. He was Regional Manager at Bombay at that time. I said you have already made it. What more do you want to do? This was, he was six years at HCL at that time, six, seven years at HCL at that time. He said I want to become an entrepreneur like you. I said good, come and see how I work but what is your complaint? He said that you don't know a day in a Regional Manager's life. You know we sit there in the Worli office in Bombay and I have people surrounding me all the time and suddenly I see new faces. Who is this guy? He joined as a trainee. He forgets that he also was a trainee just seven years before that, so he said okay, get him inducted somewhere and a whole lot of people after it starting caring and mothering somebody. Some money had to come for collection of Octroi and the money had not come so the delivery cannot be made to the customer on time, so there were whole lot of pieces which is not a very process driven company at that time, he had to go through. So I said, come and see me. So he saw me. I was the CEO at that time. At that time, we were HCL Hewlett-Packard and it was a Hewlett-Packard joint venture and I said just sit with me. Then somebody came up and said that, you know that shipment which has come, HP happened to bring a shipment larger than that and we don't have money to pay. And then somebody else came up and said so and so is waiting outside. He said, looking at these things, that for a CEO also, life doesn't change. I said it doesn't change and you will get to be the CEO someday. I am sure that that is not the way he spends the time today, but at that time, he wanted to be an entrepreneur on the top. He went through various areas and finally decided, lets get to the business of networking, which is good. In the meanwhile, I had some very fortunate experiences. In the 80s, I used to be a special invitee of the planning commission. The vice chairman of the planning commission at that time is today's Prime Minister of India, Dr. Manmohan Singh. Then, I used to sit with him and we used to call each other by first name only and many of you may not know, Dr. Manmohan Singh was the one who was the architect of the banks getting nationalized in 1969. Now, he swung all the way around to become finance minister. In 92, one of the biggest scams hit the Indian stock market. The capital market which was rising so well suddenly collapsed. He was very depressed and suddenly, he thought of me because he had met me in the planning commission, one year before that. I had gone and given him a paper of a Brazilian economist who wrote on role of IT in macroeconomics. I thought to Dr. Manmohan Singh could do with an hour's exposé on a subject like this. It is a pretty simple one, which is said. It was about electronic fund transfer and how it speeds up the movement of funds and how the rate of growth of GDP is a function of velocity of cash. He remembered that and said I will say this in Hindi he said 'Shiv se poochte hain' that means 'let us ask Shiv if he knows something about this', so he asked me do you think the computers can do something, IT can do something to make this entire stock market work better. We are talking about a period before national stock exchange, there was Bombay stock exchange. He used to go to the well and then he will say like this, "You don't know whether you are giving a buy order, you don't know whether it is a sell order, whether it is 400,000 or 40,000." You know it was as vague as that, completely left to manipulation and it took three weeks for any share settlement to take place. There was no telephone. Telephones did not exist. There was hardly any data communication. There was nothing that you could transfer as data which is in any reliable form that existed those days, so I had studied these papers. Our team came up and said that if we had to do this, there was only one way. Data communication is to come up and we had studied satellite communication. He said, we have to use satellite-based communication to make this work. I said where the hell am I going to get satellite-based communication in this country. Then we studied it further and we found the Indian satellite which is the only one the government would have finally trusted with. The Indian satellites were not using world standards. It was some what is it called extended C bands. Yes, it was an extended C Band. The world used C Band , I take it. So we just worked a broad architecture and said may be that I could go back and tell them. He said why don't you just talk to Dr. Patil. Dr. Patil used to be working for IDBI. There were five financial institutions got together and decided to form what is called national stock exchange. Dr. Patil and I knew each other very well, so he called me up to ask me, how does this work, and I went and explained the whole thing to him. He said you know incidentally, your people are waiting downstairs and I ran into Vineet with a team of people. I did not know what he had come for. I had in any case come to see Dr. Patil. He said, "Come with me". Yes it will be very awkward for me. You have to see the amount of trust that we commanded. The Finance Minister at that time, Dr. Manmohan Singh, in his great wisdom had decided to form National Stock Exchange with a satellite based communication system. After that, I am advising Dr. Patil and I said "look, it will be very awkward because I will be sitting on the other side of the table". He said, "No, you will sit on this side of the table. You are going to ask questions because of many of the questions I don't even know how to ask". So it went on for a while, asked a lot of questions. He finally felt convinced to start with satellite based communication with something with which we could build this. After that one day, I got a call from Vineet. I said, "Did you get this order." There were three people finally in contention. There was HCL with an Israeli company, there was AT&T, there was Telstra. I said somebody else should do this, because it is too critical for our country that we succeed. We don't know enough. Vineet said 'Shiv we will deliver'. Finally, if we get this we'll, make sure that we deliver, because the HCL's name will be up in front of everybody. I got a call saying that they want to announce a decision and they want to announce it in Bombay. It was a press conference in which I was made to stand and that's the time I hear that the contract has been awarded to HCL. I did not now why they did not award it to AT&T, but apparently in the discussions they said, you know end of the day, AT&T may pack up from this country and go but HCL will be there, so we are going to take that leap of faith and partner with HCL to build National Stock Exchange. It was a huge leap of faith and I was very humbled by the confidence bestowed by the government themselves to build the National Stock Exchange. And in that meeting they asked, why did we choose HCL, this is because they will be here and they will make us build and make a support and they announced it at that time that there is something called Muhurat trading, that means the trading begins for the year for most of the stock brokers, it was on the night of Deepawali, that is the day of worshiping the Goddess of Wealth and they begin it and they said, that is the date and we had no idea. There were no dates agreed with us, there was no SLAs fully written and the contract was being announced and the date of inauguration was already been stated. It was nightmarish thing to go through and it was a huge leap of faith the government took and the satellite with which were supposed to begin almost packed up about 10 days before that and we had to change the direction of the VSATs all over the country in all these places and all extended HCL, that means all HCL Infosystems, all the engineers, everybody worked and then got it to deliver and we did begin the trading on time and till now we continue to support the National Stock Exchange. I thought, this is new to India, the application was new to India, the stock exchange was new to India. Everything was new to everyone. It is the guts of pioneership the first time, and they were afraid, the first thing to be partner with us and if you go where we went into many of these places, you'd like to walk that path. I hope, I have been able to get the gist of what partnership means to us, what pioneership means to us and in many of the things what you want to do in India or anywhere else in the world, this I hope, helps you understand HCL better and I wish you all the very best in such exploring partnerships, exploring new things from becoming competitive to becoming combative.

Thanks and welcome to HCL.