TCS launches India-focused sovereign cloud to boost domestic revenue

Mint

24-04-2025

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) on Thursday unveiled a push to significantly expand its domestic footprint, launching sovereign cloud networks and forging key partnerships with government bodies as India becomes its fastest-growing market.
India contributed $2.6 billion, or 8.6%, to the company's overall revenue of $30.18 billion in the financial year ended March 2025. This is nearly double the company's domestic revenue of $1.31 billion three years ago.
The revenue of the country's largest software services company rose 17% in these three years.
The launch of India-centric platforms and collaboration announcements with government bodies is in line with the company's plans to make India a $10-billion market, about four times its current size, as outlined by Tata Sons chairman Natarajan Chandrasekaran in last year's annual strategic retreat titled 'Blitz.'
The company's chief executive, however, tempered stance on this target.
'I won't want to put a number but this is one of our steps to scale up business from India,' K. Krithivasan, chief executive of TCS, said.
His colleague voiced a similar perspective.
'Today's launch is essentially all about TCS sharpening its business in India,' said Girish Ramachandran, president of growth markets at TCS. Growth markets at TCS include all business outside the Americas and Europe, and make up almost a fifth of the company's revenue.
The company launched the TCS SovereignSecure Cloud in New Delhi at its 'Accelerating India' event, which was attended by senior executives, clients of the IT outsourcer, and members of the press.
The Mumbai-headquartered company also announced partnerships with government bodies including RailTel and the Centre for Development and Advanced Computing (C-DAC).
As part of its collaboration with RailTel, the company will be launching a sovereign cloud for the government-owned telecom operator, whereas with C-DAC, which is a government-owned research and development institution, TCS will develop cloud technologies.
Companies generate huge amounts of data as part of their daily functioning. Traditionally, this data was stored in large servers within physical data centres which were susceptible to damage. With the introduction of cloud, such data need not be stored in data centres. Cloud systems are like co-working spaces where multiple companies get seats, or in this case, memory to store this data and information technology (IT) infrastructure. This reduces the dependence on resource-intensive data centres and eliminates the risk of physical damage to large servers.
A sovereign cloud ensures that a company's data is stored within certain geographical boundaries and adheres to local data privacy laws.
TCS SovereignSecure Cloud is an indigenous cloud built and managed by TCS. This cloud comes with integrated artificial intelligence capabilities to support government institutions, public-sector enterprises, and regulated industries.
'It provides data-driven insights for faster decision-making​, and advanced analytics to monitor performance, usage, and trends, thereby boosting productivity, enhancing citizen services, and enabling intelligent, data-driven governance,' said TCS in a release dated 24 April.
At least one analyst attributed the move to TCS's growing interest in India.
'TCS is steadfastly committed to India as a geography. This is just another step in that direction,' said Abhishek Kumar, equity research analyst at JM Financial, a Mumbai-based brokerage.
'While it's early to assess revenue contribution from these efforts, these will be helpful in backfilling BSNL gap over medium term,' added Kumar.
To be sure, much of TCS's growth in FY25 was aided by Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd, a state-run telecom operator. TCS signed a $1.83 billion deal with BSNL in May 2023 to set up data centres as part of a 4G network deployment order.
The company also launched two more platforms-including TCS DigiBOLT and TCS Cyber Defense Suite.
TCS DigiBOLT is a platform to help organisations digitise their operations without adding much code. TCS Cyber Defense Suite is its cybersecurity platform to help companies detect and respond to cyber threats using AI, and mitigate cyber risks. The cyber defence platform will also provide preventive controls for identity, infrastructure, network, applications, and data assets.
TCS's revenue grew 3.78% year-on-year and while the company does not give revenue growth guidance, its management indicated a sluggish start to FY26. Peers Infosys Ltd and HCL Technologies Ltd, grew 3.85% and 4.3%, respectively, whereas Bengaluru-based Wipro Ltd reported a 2.7% decline in revenue.
Infosys projected a flat to 3% revenue growth for FY26 in constant currency terms, its weakest guidance since April 2009, when it had projected a revenue decline of 6.7-3.1% for FY10. India's third-largest software services provider HCLTech was a tad more optimistic than its peers, estimating growth at 2%-5% in FY26.
Wipro, on the other hand, expects slowest revenue growth in the April-June period of FY26. The company has already outlined a quarterly revenue decline between 3.5% and 1.5% in constant currency terms. While Infosys and HCLTech give yearly guidance, Wipro gives quarterly estimates.
First Published: 24 Apr 2025, 08:04 PM IST