DQ Top 20:#6 HCL Technologies

With a remarkable 31% revenue growth in Fy2014, HCL Technologies retains its 6th position in the DQ rankings. It was an eventful year as the company crossed the $5 bn mark in terms of revenue. Despite the economic uncertainties prevailing in the market, HCL has been able to perform better than most of its competitors for several quarters in a row. The company believes that its strategy of having a broad-based portfolio, in terms of verticals, service lines and geographies has paid off in tough times.

Infrastructure services continue to be the key growth driver for the company. In the Jan-March 2014 quarter, the company signed around 12 transformational deals across all service lines with infrastructure services constituting half of the same. Across verticals, financial services and manufacturing were most prominent. While the Americas' market grew 11%, Europe was up by 26% as compared to the previous year quarter. On the whole, the company benefitted from the rupee fall and also from operational efficiencies.

At the end of their first quarter, which was from July-September 2013, the company had announced its plans of expanding its facilities globally, creating over 30,000 seats, primarily in campuses across Noida, Bengaluru, and Chennai. HCL is also expanding its near-shore facility in Mexico to serve clients in the North American market.

Partnerships and Multi-year deals

Fiscal 2014 was an year of partnerships for the IT services company. The most memorable was the one with rival CSC to deliver application modernization services. This was said to be a strategic alliance and created quite a stir in the industry. As part of the partnership, HCL plans to open delivery centers in Bengaluru and Chennai. Experts were of the view that the alliance will help the company in strengthening its presence in the financial services space and help in enhancing its application services business which has been on a rough patch for some time.

Another significant development was the Enterprise Application Services (EAS) division of HCL Technologies extending its overall partnership with SAP by signing a new global managed mobility agreement. Under the contract, HCL will be permitted to resell, implement, and host SAP solutions.

The year also saw HCL striking some large services deals. It entered into a multi-year engagement with Vestas Wind Systems A/S to provide application development and management and IT consultancy services.

The contract with Anglo American, to transform its end user computing and data center landscape was also an important one. It is indicative of HCL's increasing focus on the developing markets.

Another prominent deal was the one with Direct Energy to manage its residential billing and customer care operations in the Alberta market.
Additionally, HCL and Consumers Energy, the principal subsidiary of CMS Energy announced the opening of a Global Center of Excellence (GCoE) called Michigan Technology Development Center (MTDC).

The company recently partnered with Linkedin to launch an application aimed at encouraging users to go above and beyond the scope of their existing contracts.

HCL has indicated initiatives to expand its offerings across service lines. It has been posting good revenue growth and showing consistent improvement in margins, but to sustain the growth momentum the company will have to implement more levers and beef up IT services to improve overall revenues.