Shiv Nadar on Technology Pivot

The Foundation's official profile frames Nadar as a pioneer of the computing and IT industry in India, crediting him with steering HCL through every technological revolution since 1976 — from mainframe-era indigenous computers through client-server, software services and modern engineering R&D, a 48-year arc few 1970s-founded IT firms anywhere have matched.

HCL started as a hardware outfit manufacturing India's first indigenous computers before evolving into a comprehensive software-services organisation — a hardware-to-services pivot the Foundation positions as a continuous engineering-and-research identity rather than a defensive retreat from commoditised hardware.

Nadar's nickname among friends — Magus, Old Persian for wizard — captured a reputation for contrarian problem-solving that defined HCL's pivots across hardware, software and services through four and a half decades of technological change.

According to Nadar, only three computer companies founded in the 1970s still survived in 2006 — IBM, Apple and HCL — with HCL shipping its first computer in the same quarter as Apple, an achievement he repeatedly invoked to establish HCL's status as a global computing pioneer rather than a purely Indian services firm.

Nadar told Wharton that HCL wrote Genesis, the first relational database, ahead of Oracle — written from scratch, not derived from IBM's DB-2 or CICS — because the team believed hierarchical databases could not meet emerging client-server architectures; the product was technically ahead of its time and ultimately failed commercially in India.

Looking forward in 2006, Nadar predicted that future organisations would resemble IKEA — a brand-franchise model where manufacturing, design and distribution are redistributed across countries — and framed HCL's opportunity around this redistribution of work rather than the maintenance of legacy codebases.

Nadar argued that HCL's contrarian bets — building hardware when peers fled, writing a relational database when Indian firms weren't even computerised, refusing body-shopping — came from having 'no mental baggage', a deliberate refusal to inherit the assumptions of the existing IT-services playbook.