Food and beverage major PepsiCo is one of the biggest buyers of Indian IT services. Caroline Watteeuw, the company's Global Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of Business Information Solutions, makes three trips to India every year to negotiate new projects. But now, she is attending the Intel Capital Summit in Huntington Beach. Over sushi and a glass of wine, she tells BT about the tech bets her company is keen on.
Technology they want to keep an eye on
We are betting on what we call SMAC. It is Social, Mobile, Advanced and Immersive
Analytics,
Cloud. There are a couple of things that are not relevant for
PepsiCo but interesting. I call them comeback kids. If you go back 15 years when Xerox was at its peak, it was all about very precise ink-jet printers. Right now, people are trying to use ink-jet printer technology and refocus it on creating organs (researchers at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, for instance, are using modified ink-jet technology to build tissue and organ prototypes). It is absolutely phenomenal. Then there are three dimensional maps. You have 3D TV, gaming and printing. 3D maps will allow you to navigate through different layers of geography to do oil and gas exploration in a very different way.
On IT projects resulting from SMAC
All large companies have to deal with the aging of the baby boomers. This requires knowledge transfer of tech knowhow. The young generation doesn't want to read books. So social is right in there. Second, PepsiCo is investing in the mobile area and there are a lot of large projects in m-commerce. We were one of the first companies to conduct sales on mobile devices. Big analytics is being used to understand consumer behaviour. We are also doing social analytics. We are trying to get the products and the campaigns to be more successful. Then if you are talking of an immersive experience, you do three dimensional representations of the outputs of analytics.
On the company's IT budget It is in billions every year, but we don't publish that. If you look at consumer product goods companies, IT budgets are between 1 per cent to 2 per cent of their revenues. PepsiCo is a $66 billion company.
On projects outsourced to IndiaWe have been sourcing partners in India for a very long time. We have
Infosys , Cognizant and TCS as our vendors. Our biggest partner is Infosys in application support. TCS is more into some of the innovative ventures like analytics, difficult specialty applications like transportation optimization systems. We work with Cognizant on testing, mobility and business intelligence applications.
(The writer is attending the Intel Capital Summit in Southern California on the invitation of the VC firm.)
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