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| Shantanu Narayen, CEO of Adobe Systems |
Shantanu
Narayen, CEO of Adobe Systems, says that the Indian IT industry is entering a
phase of enterprise software where companies must have the stomach to embrace
change. He feels that the current digital push by the government has ensured
tremendous opportunities for all the players and it is only a matter of picking
the right bets. Edited excerpts of an interview:
Q: Your
new office in Noida is an indication of your confidence in India as well as
your growth plans for India. So, we have always talked about how bullish you
are about the India story and how strategic a role India plays in Adobe’s
growth plans. But from where you sit today, what does India look like?
You are
right. Whenever I come here, we actually wear two hats. The first one is India
as a market in itself and how that is growing and we can talk about Digital
India and all of the opportunities that is going to afford.
And
second is the role that the Adobe India centre plays in our global aspirations.
We have been growing really well as a company and India has always had a
disproportionate part of that growth. So yes, we continue to be excited. We are
always ranked one of the best places to work here and employees are doing some
amazing stuff.
Q:Your
results are out on 28 September, so you cannot give us any forward-looking
statements or talk about numbers, but I can talk to you about the kind of
growth that we have seen for Adobe in your previous quarter and once again
record revenues that you have announced in Q2 and lastly on the back of the
kind of growth that you have seen as far as your cloud businesses are
concerned. On the back of that,how do you manage expectations at this point in
time? People are expecting after nine quarters that you are going to be able to
deliver on this kind of growth. I do not want to talk to you about numbers, but
how do you manage expectations and what is the dilemma and the challenge of
being able to do that?
We look
at opportunity and at the end of the day, if we can demonstrate, especially to
financial investors, how large the opportunity is and if you can demonstrate a
cadence for execution, then you think expectations will take care of it.
So, I
like to focus a lot more on the opportunities, both the opportunities we have
talked about, namely the entire creative economy and how design is becoming
more important and aesthetics and how the creative cloud is clearly pioneered, how
you can transform an existing desktop business into a cloud subscription-based
business.
The
second is the marketing cloud and everything to do with digital disruption.
There is not an industry in the world that is not getting disrupted by
technology; we are enabling them to use technology to do that. And so, two
massive opportunities and as long as we continue to execute, the financial
expectation takes care of itself.
Q: Let me
talk to you about dealing with government and specifically in India, the Prime
Minister has this big Digital India vision and you have of course met him in
the Valley. In India as well, a lot of people are betting on that opportunity.
We were talking to Linkedin. They have launched three products specifically for
India, developed in India, made for and made by India. How are you seeing this
play out? It has been about two-and-a-half years since the Digital India vision
in that sense was unveiled.
There are
a couple of things that make India a really unique opportunity as they relate
to Digital India. The first is mobile.
India has
the opportunity to leapfrog generations of technology and in this mobile-first
or, in many cases, mobile only environment, any company like Adobe or others in
the Valley who use India as an opportunity to innovate around mobile first, it
is going to pay off not just in India as an opportunity, but also everywhere
else, in all of the other markets. So, that is one big opportunity.
However,
when you look at what has happened here with the Aadhaar card and everything to
do with how people are moving inefficient paper based processes to digital, the
Adobe Sign product has a very unique opportunity.
Think
about identity on the web and how if you can digitally complete a transaction.
So, Adobe Sign and what the government is doing with respect to what is
happening on Aadhaar or companies like e-mudhra are actually able to now do
digital transactions, I think that is just a massive opportunity. And last but
not least the cost of transactions in India, whether it is financial services
or automotive, are much lower.
And so,
targeting how you can look at efficiencies in your business and then translate
that across the world, we are actually continuing to see growth. When you see
companies like Interglobe Aviation (Indigo), they are among the most successful
in the world, or what is happening with companies that in some cases are
emulating Us-based business models in travel or automotive or transportation,
just a big opportunity for us in India.
Q:I will
get to the enterprise opportunity in just a second, but let me continue to talk
to you about the government opportunity. One of the concerns specifically that
we saw in at least as far as the domestic technology companies when dealing
with government was that revenues are inconsistent. They are patchy and lumpy.
I know you do not like any of those words. So, what is your India team telling
you in terms of being able to transact and deal with government? Has it got
significantly better and easier?
We look
at it as a little bit of a do you have the right bowling pins and if you have
the bowling pins strategy—maybe we are a little bit more fortunate than local
companies in that given the magnitude of our business, we can take a much
longer-range approach to some of these businesses.
And for
us, maybe the only metric is not revenue. In other words, if we can find that
we are actually serving customers well and you are getting government agencies
to adopt these technologies, you believe that as the number of transactions
increase, the revenue will follow. In the commercial space for example, a
similar opportunity might be in video whereas the amount of video that is being
consumed, and the Olympics were certainly an example of that, is happening more
on digital.
If you price
your model where you are getting revenue as digital streams increase, it will
take care of itself. So, our approach at Adobe has always been let us go find
some key customers in government who have this vision of digital transformation
and as long as you get them signed up and you build a great product and the
business model allows you to grow as the business grows, that is a luxury that
we have over the smaller companies.
