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BOOK REVIEW ON THE TCS STORY..... AND BEYOND
Name of the Book:
The TCS Story ...and Beyond
Name of the Author:
S Ramadorai
Name of the Publisher:
Penguin Books
Generation now will scarce believe that there was a time not too long ago when computers were looked upon by some as useless nuisance. In the Late 1960's when Tata Group Chairman, Mr. JRD Tata took the farsighted decision to create Tata Consultancy Services.
The story of TCS began with a fateful decision in the mid-sixties: Colonel Sawhney, "brother-in-law, aide and confidant" of JRD Tata floated a proposal to pool the Tata group's need for data processing in a single business unit. The West had just started to invest in commercial mainframe computers to deal with inventories and payrolls. JRD latched on to the idea and cleared the plan for a data processing centre. Tata Sons - the group's holding company - invested all of ? 50 lakh in the venture.
However the road less travelled is often filled with hardships and struggles. The behemoths within the Tata group treated the fledgling with disdain and were loath to hand over their data processing work to it. Most wanted it to only deal with some tiresome shareholder accounting work. The exception was Tata Electric (now Tata Motors) which shoveled a lot of sophisticated work to the new entity. It was in this environment that a bunch of people @ TCS led by Mr. F. C Kohli soldiered...