As a company, we’re flatter, faster, and more focussed : Lingraju Sawkar, President, Kyndryl India

New York-based Kyndryl was created as a spin-off from IBM’s infrastructure services business. Since its debut on the NYSE in November 2021, the company is moving quickly with a growth strategy that’s driven by a “technology-agnostic” approach, six new practice areas, and a resolve to create a fast, flat, and focussed working culture. “We’re focused on being restless to continuously learn and innovate, being empathetic, and being devoted to shared success,” Lingraju Sawkar, president, Kyndryl India told Sudhir Chowdhary in a recent interview.

Kyndryl debuted on the NYSE as a company with a presence across 60+ countries. What do you consider your key strengths, challenges, and opportunities?
We are on a mission to build the very best technology services company in the industry. We dream up, build, and manage the most modern and resilient technology systems that the world depends on each day. Our strengths are our operating model and go-to-market that are aligned to our customers’ needs. We operate in 63 countries with a global team, state-of-the-art delivery operations, and the freedom to forge alliances with leading technology players.

The key areas of opportunity lie in augmenting our services through expanded capabilities in six global practices that are underpinned by our offerings, solutioning and design, and delivery integration strengths. And, we attract new customers because we’re “technology-agnostic” when it comes to working with partners to solve critical technology challenges.

You were previously focussed on managed infrastructure services. Will that continue to form the core of your offerings?
A key tenet of Kyndryl’s growth strategy is meeting customers wherever they are on their digital transformation journey. Our single integrated customer engagement model focusses on the six global practices of Cloud; Core Enterprise & zCloud; Digital Workplace; Applications, Data & AI; Security & Resiliency; and Network & Edge. These global practices will design and deploy offerings, set standards and ensure they integrate with the other services we offer. They will develop solutions and advanced delivery capabilities to deliver them through a highly upskilled community of Kyndryl practitioners. The services offered are also aligned across advisory and implementation services to ensure consistency in our go-to-market approach.

How are you defining the new culture at Kyndryl and what has changed?
We’re on a clear trajectory of improved growth and margin expansion, with greater ability to partner, invest, and capture new opportunities. Our culture – the Kyndryl Way – underpins everything we do. It is based on three values – being restless to continuously learn and innovate, being empathetic, and being devoted to shared success.

We now organise and act as a firm that is flatter, faster, and more focussed. We have significantly reduced layers of management, and become faster by reducing process and decision-making timelines.

Our customers are very excited about the strategy that we’ve laid out for them. Our role in India is to be a trusted partner to companies and organisations and enable them to build next-generation digital infrastructure across the country.

You’ve announced a series of partnerships with Microsoft, AWS, Google, SAP, VMware, and Nokia. What’s the thinking behind these partnerships?
Partnering with global players like Microsoft, AWS, Google Cloud and SAP allows us to deliver cutting-edge solutions in high-growth areas where customers are demanding innovation. The Microsoft partnership involves a new co-innovation lab to build and deploy cloud solutions and with AWS we are developing an accelerator for VMWare Cloud on AWS.

We are upskilling our talent base through the Kyndryl University for Microsoft, AWS Cloud Center of Excellence, and SAP certifications programmes for capabilities in global cloud and infrastructure operations. Kyndryl now has more than 16,000 hyperscaler certifications among its employees. Our global network and edge computing alliance with Nokia provides industrial-grade reliable LTE and 5G private wireless networking for enterprise customers. The collaborations with Cloudera and Lenovo will power mission-critical hybrid cloud and edge computing initiatives.

The space that Kyndryl’s operating in is becoming extremely competitive. What makes you stand out?
We are coming with a 100-year-old history of stability and experience combined with the flexibility and agility of a start-up. From day one, we are the number one Hybrid Cloud Managed Services company globally with market-leading size and scale. In India, we are the leaders in the IT Infrastructure services business and power essential services for over a billion people in collaboration with our customers. We plan to grow our business by forming new partnerships with global and local partners and working in new ways to support our customers in India.