BENGALURU: Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka, who has the ardent task of reviving the company, on Wednesday criticised the Indian IT industry's business practice of "doing old things cheaper" and said firms should innovate more.

"As I speak to you it is my 100th day as the CEO of Infosys. I was not deeply familiar with the services industry until recently. As I had thought about the opportunities in front of us and the current state of Infosys, I see a tale of two cities," Sikka said.

In his recorded key note address through video at CeBIT India 2014 here, he said, "I find that on the one hand we have a great opportunity in front of us to help accelerate the reshaping of world with software. But at the same time, I also see the reality that we are currently in - that is a somewhat depressing reality."

"I find all of us in the industry find ourselves on a downward spiral. It's like a treadmill of increasingly lower cost, hiring people faster and faster from more and more mediocre places, training people less and less, putting them into job faster and faster. I think that is a wrong direction," he added.

Sikka, the first outsider who has not been part of the co-founders club to lead the Bangalore-based firm, became the CEO of the company earlier this year at a time when fortunes of once-IT-bellwether were down and rivals were doing relatively better. He has come from US-based SAP.

CeBIT India, billed as world's largest business IT and ICT event, is being held in association with Bangalore ITE.biz, India's flagship ICT event of Karnataka Government.

Stating that there is a better direction Sikka said, "I think we can do better than that. I think that we can be partners of our clients not only Infosys, but all of us in the industry, to be strategically relevant to them."

"To work with them on the challenges that they face not only on lowering costs, labour arbitrage and staff augmentation. They are depressing ideas. I think we can do better than that,"

Sikka said, "We can be much greater strategic partners to our clients on the basis of innovation, intelligence, automation and techniques, instead of looking at doing old things cheaper, we should look at doing new things."

Sikka is part of the business delegation that is accompanying Prime Minister Narendra Modi on his three nation tour to Myanmar, Australia and Fiji that is on currently. 

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