BrazilSangram Sahoo on the growth of Tata Consultancy Services in Peru
From his base in Lima, Sangram Sahoo leads the Peru business of Tata Consultancy Services, a global technology and IT services company. A discussion with Sangram on his more than decade at the helm of the Indian corporation in the country.
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is one of the largest information technology services companies worldwide. Its portfolio of services spans software development and maintenance, data migration to the cloud, implementation of technology solutions, artificial intelligence, and more.
Having joined TCS in 1996 in its Mumbai office, Sangram has witnessed the rise in demand for digital services, and in its slipstream the rise of TCS into a global player. After spending the first years in India, Sangram then held roles in other Asian countries such as Japan, Singapore and Indonesia. Later, in 2000, he made the jump to the United States, where he was in charge of business development and operations in the country.
In 2004, Sangram crossed to Latin America, initially working in Chile for several years. After serving as Regional Delivery Head for Chile, Peru and Ecuador, he assumed his current role of Regional Vice President for Peru in 2012. “Working in the consulting industry in Peru was an opportunity to build the company from scratch. It was a different challenge,” he said.
In Peru, Tata Consultancy Services works for clients in the banking, retail, and manufacturing sectors, as well as airlines and gas distributors. Following a challenging 2020 and 2021 due to the onslaught of the pandemic, TCS has since then experienced strong growth in Peru, driven by booming demand for digital transformation and technology services.
Highlighting examples of its work, TCS is currently undertaking an automation and robotization project in the back-office function of a client in the banking sector. This project is seeing TCS digitize processes, and implement software robots that automate repetitive and tedious tasks, helping the bank to free up its staff to more value-adding tasks.
TCS is meanwhile helping another banking clients with moving part of its processes and IT operations to the cloud. “We see a number of customers using the multi-cloud approach. They have their operations on different public clouds. So we provide services for them to migrate, manage and optimize their data to a single cloud,” Sangram explained.
As for artificial intelligence, the Indian executive said that TCS is supporting organizations across the lifecycle, from the development of use cases, to pilot projects and the full scaling of AI applications. “Generative AI is a very promising development within AI,” he said.
Developing capabilities
In order for Tata Consultancy Services to remain at the forefront of the market, Sangram said that staff training in technological capabilities such as data and analytics must be constant. “At TCS, we invest significantly in the continued development of our staff. Our training is oriented towards the cloud, data, analytics and artificial intelligence.”
On the other hand, the executive recognizes that cybersecurity is a key area for companies in Peru and the region, due to the increase in data leaks. With this in mind, TCS provides all its staff – programmers, project managers, consultants and eve managers – with cybersecurity training. At the end of the course, there is an exam that must be passed so that employees can demonstrate minimum knowledge in cybersecurity.
In order to provide this learning ecosystem, TCS has alliances with several partners that grant access to online and in-person courses , as well as their respective certifications. “Learning and sharing is one of the key principles of our employee value proposition,” Sangram concluded.
