Friends, Welcome to HCL, a high-energy company welcomes you. On behalf of 45,000 colleagues of mine, a very, very, warm welcome to all of my friends, and friends' friends, their girlfriends and boyfriends. Welcome!

No where in the history of the world, have uncertainty driven opportunities. Business leaders today are focused on these uncertainties and try to leverage and unleash these uncertainties and convert them into opportunities and competitive differentiators. One of the ways the business leaders are achieving this process of uncertainties to competitive differentiators is a process of business transformation and that is the reason this word is used and overused again and again. Business transformation everybody is attempting and leveraging these uncertainties into opportunities. However, when I look at the case study of HCL there is some learning for us.

When we started the journey of transformation 30 months ago, we had 10 things, if you ask me how is it so different compared to its competitors, I would say 10 of them and let me name a few of them to try and make this point. So I would say the Multi-service Approach, I would say the Multi-infrastructure Management, Integrated Services, our APO methodology of integrating applications, our SOA Architecture to drive business processes and time to market and we would talk about our technology disruptive ideas on concept of manufacturing. Interestingly what 30 months ago were unique differentiators are now adopted by the industrial standards. So HCL has an advantage but not a competitive differentiation in any of these five areas. So what is the learning; the learning is the fact that to create sustainable differentiation you need to do something else and therefore the sustainability element of business transformation becomes very, very, relevant for us to discuss today. One of the ways of creating sustainable differentiation is the concept of collaboration.

We have seen that in Dreamliner project of Boeing, we have seen that in Wikipedia, that through collaboration you potentially could create transformation, which is sustainable and goes on, on and on. And that is the reason this conference is around collaborative transformation and not just about transformation. If I go back into case of HCL once again and you ask me which are the other 5, which continue to be a differentiation that is an interesting answer. So let us just revisit them. So the first differentiation that we launched, which continues to be a differentiation, is the fact that Value Centric focus instead of Volume Centricity. When we decided and announced that we do not want to be the biggest, but we want to be the best and we are going to focus on value that we deliver to our customers, value which we deliver to our employees, and value which we deliver to our partners and the value focus will drive the differentiation. I think we got that right! To be able to achieve that we did the second differentiation which is the Employee First. A lot of you yesterday, met me over dinner and Qawwali and said, Amit has done a great job, Mike has done a great job, Dan has done a great job. None of you said Vineet, you have done a great job. And the reason for that is the value really is getting created between the employee and the customer. It is not getting created between Vineet and you. And you got that right! If the value has been created between the employee and the customer, then the organizations' imperatives have to be focused on the employee. And make sure we feel accountable to him, we give him the tools, frameworks, technologies and an enabling environment, so that he can do what he is supposed to do which is create value for you. So Employees First is the second differentiation and we got that right. It continues to be a sustainable advantage for us.

Third, our whole culture of trust, transparency and flexibility. We believe and rightly so, that you have to push the envelop of transparency to create trust. Trusted relationships are going to be unique differentiation in coming years. You are going to have fewer relationships, but if they are trusted, then you would be able to create significantly more value in those relationships, for yourself and your customers. So trusted relationship, by pushing the envelop of transparency became the third differentiation. The word flexibility got added, which was very interesting when we figured out, rightly so, that we are actually in the business of our customer's business. And the customer's business, if it is surrounded with so much uncertainty then how is it that we can seek certainty in our relationship with our customer? Does it make sense? So it is like asking the customer for an insurance policy where he himself does not have an insurance policy from his business. So, if we are not going to demonstrate flexibility in our relationship without customers than we are on the wrong end of the stick and there is a disruption which is going to happen in our relationship. So combination of that created a company, which is what you see is what you get. And the reason of putting 350 of you together in this room is that - what you see is what you get! There are lots of extremely good experiences in this room and there are some horrible, horrendous case studies in this room, where we really screwed up. But, pushing the envelope of transparency and making sure that everybody understands what is the good and bad of the company creates that differentiation and that is what we are focused on, as different. And the last is about the relationship. Something that is very critical for us is that we want to do business with fewer customers, but become more strategic for them. And we believe that we would be able to transform our business model if we continuously focus on that relationship - fewer customers, more for them, more and more value for them.

So these are the 4 tenets of differentiation of HCL which have sustained themselves despite achieving uncertainty, despite people copying and these are 4 tenets which have not been copied by the industry, because it really originates from who you are for the last 30 years, what kind of company you are. And that is critical for us. There is a very interesting example which you know Chuck Ciali shared with me yesterday, I would like to share it with you as to why I believe this is working. A year ago he told me he came and met our colleagues in Chennai, and he got only one question from the audience. And day before yesterday, he was in Chennai once again and the story he tells me is, one of the Oracle executives who works for Oracle coding for him asked him the question that if all the IT work gets done in India and most of your market is in India then when are you shifting your headquarters to India. For an employee to establish that level of relationship, right with a CIO to be able to standup and ask a business question and not an IT question. I think HCL has created or is in the process of creating that unique differentiation. So that brings me to a very critical question in terms of why are you here? I believe that the reason you are here is because you see some value in association with HCL. Otherwise, you would not have taken an air trip on the weekend away from the family and invested in coming to HCL and my great appreciation for the same. But the first step on collaborative transformation you have already taken. At HCL we have to take the second step. So what is that step? When we did, the whole conceptualization of the global customer meet, one of the things, which I asked my colleagues so what would happen? And they would raise their hands in saying Microsoft will contribute this and Cisco would say this and Boeing will contribute the fact what we did and Johnson & Johnson will say this and Spansion would say this and AMD would say this, Avayya would say this. And everybody, all my colleagues were saying there is so much value which the customers bring to the table that we must share it. What was the bad news? There was no consistency. So that means we were not consistently delivering the same value to all our customers. And every customer was extracting value out of HCL rather than HCL delivering value. So we are in the learning journey and will learn. So I would say that, can we create an environment where we would enable our customers to extract the value they can derive out of HCL? So what we did is we put this conference together which has today between 350 to 400 CIOs, I do not know what the like final count is, making it the largest conclave of CIOs anywhere in the world. I am leaving the CTOs out of the conference that happens in Vegas.

And the way we want to leverage this is in 3 tracks. Track 1, is we have 350 practitioners of global sourcing. These 350 people have more experience than HCL or anybody else and they will share their experience of how they have extracted value out of partnerships in global sourcing including from HCL and there is no bigger learning than from them and that is Track 1. Track 2 is about technology disruption and a lot of vendors would sell technology disruption, because of the concept of create the fear and then earn the dollars. However, we have practitioners here who have used well and not so well and therefore there is a learning on how they have leveraged the technology disruptions which we are facing today, to their benefits or to their failures. And the third track is that you cannot ignore the social environment in which you work, so the environmental issue, the competitiveness of India, the education issues and many other issues which surround our environment are critical and again we will have practitioners coming from all walks of life to share their experiences with you. So I leave you with only two questions. Question number 1, what value should I derive out of HCL? That question is critical for you to answer, because HCL will give value but it is important for you to ask that question for yourself. What value should I derive from HCL? And the second question, when you take a plane ride back to home, you should have a question as to there are 4 or 5 choices in my mind of how different partners can help me in my collaborative transformation journey and if you have those four ideas, I think this conference is a success. So once again, welcome, thank you very much for participating and I hope you had a great time with us. Thank you.