Tata Consultancy Services

strong and the environment in which orders could be easily obtained was still miles
away. Mr. Ramadorai said that more than for TCS, they thought ―we should do good
work in order to gain credibility for India.‖
In the same year, TCS received a big job from a major credit card company, American
Express, for developing their Payment Acceptance System. The project was a grand
success and TCS‘s credibility in America expanded. In those days, due to cost cutbacks,
several American companies outsourced their IT jobs and TCS proved that it could
provide good service at a low cost and its business opportunities expanded.
Progress in the 1980s: ―To build assets for the nation‖
Along with expansion of its business in the 1980s, TCS carried out a new structure for
further development. Particularly noteworthy amongst these was the establishment of
the research and development (R&D) organization. In order to enhance its technological
capabilities, TCS, in 1981, set up for the first time in India, a sophisticated large scale
R&D facility--Tata Research, Design, and Development Center (TRDDC)--in Pune, a
city of universities, which is 100 kilometers to the south east of Mumbai. This was Mr.
Kohli‘s brainchild and he worked hard to set it up.
Façade of TRDDC (Pune City)
The reason behind setting up a research
and development organization was that,
first of all, such a facility was not present
in India, as most state-of-the-art
computer technologies were in the
Western world. Besides, in those days in
India let alone companies, even
universities were not conducting
professional education in the field. But,
the first idea actually came up ―by chance‖
with no connection with IT.
From 1973 to 1974, Mr. Kohli, as an executive of IEEE, which is the world‘s largest
professional body of engineers (originated in the 19 th century and、at present, it has
400,000 members in 160 countries across the world, with its headquarters in New York),
attended its meetings in America several times. It was the era of the Oil Shock and all
the other 29 members of IEEE were working at universities in America and were
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