Krishnan Thiagarajan has 30 years’ experience spanning two distinct worlds – with the latest stint in the IT industry focussed on Strategy, Market Research and Competitive Intelligence and prior one in financial/business journalism which helped hone the global multidisciplinary perspective across multiple industries, of which IT/Telecom were the prominent ones. His 13+ year IT stint at Cognizant offered him an “inside out” perspective of a company that scaled from a billion dollars to a multi-billion-dollar entity during this period. And his prior 13+ tenure at Business Line, the financial publication of The Hindu group highlighted the importance of “outside-in” thinking for researching business/corporate developments from multiple angles based on understanding of the industry nuances and leveraging knowledge networks built over time.

At Cognizant, being a member of the integrated Corporate Strategy, Marketing and Communications portfolio, in his initial years, he helped incubate and run the Competitive Intelligence practice closely tracking the performance of Global SIs and the India-centric Tier-I and mid-tier companies in a structured way and later steered the core portfolio of Global Corporate Strategy as the head of Offshore Strategy team. This tenure involved a combination of long-term strategy planning, market sensing and opportunity scoping for “digital imperatives” and spearheading one of the three key lines of business created in 2015 as the Corporate Strategy Lead.

The learnings from this blend of the outside-in and inside-out, continue to shape his thought process and analysis on trends and developments in the IT industry in the backdrop of the broader business ecosystem.