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In the Drivers Seat

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DQI Bureau
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Bagdadi believes in situational leadership and allows his team

members to solve their problems themselves. "Team conflicts primarily

happen due to lack of roadmap or clarity of goal, inter group conflicts, and

focus on one-upmanship. And if one shows enough trust and delegates well,

majority of team problems get resolved. Being a flat organization, where command

and follow does not work, we try to provide opportunities to express and

deliver to our team members without walking on each others toes," he

says. One of his key tasks includes selecting and building the next in line team

thereby ensuring a consistent dialog and ability to coach subordinates.

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The Beginning



A true-blue Mumbaikar, Bagdadi was born and brought up in Mumbai, where he
completed his schooling at Elphinstone Technical High School and intermediate

from St Xaviers College. Armed with a mechanical engineering degree from VJTI,

Bagdadi joined New Standard Engineering as a shop floor engineer. "Even

though I was a mechanical engineer I was inclined toward IT. Many doubted my

choice, since this was at a time when computers werent a rage," he says.

In 1979, he finally got an opportunity as a trainee computer programmer in

Godrej & Boyce where he rose in the ranksfrom being a team leader to the

functional programming head.

Anwer Bagdadi,

senior VP and CTO, CFC India Services
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While completion of his diploma in systems management, Bagdadi

bagged a scholarship from Japan for a six-month software engineering course.

Tokyo was the place where Bagdadi got his first taste of studying abroad and

"learnt a lot at NEC". Back from Tokyo, Bagdadi joined Godrejs

management services group with the idea of providing a consultative function to

various departments on how to use technology.

After working for eleven years at Godrej, Bagdadi moved on to

join a Godrej JV with GE known as Godrej-GE Appliances where he worked as a CIO

for nine years. After his long innings with Godrej, Bagdadi changed a few jobs

and joined CFC Countrywide in 2004 where he was the second employee.

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Projects Implemented



Engaged in providing offshore processing and IT services to its parent
company, Countrywide Financial Corporation (CFCI) is a provider of diversified

mortgage financial services in selected markets. Since going live in May 2004,

the company has made three sites operational across two cities, providing more

than 1,400 BPO seats, 1,200 ITS seats, and approximately 100 KPO seats. The IT

infrastructure architecture uses state-of-the-art hardware configurations with

fail-proof capabilities. The IT infrastructure is chosen from approved standards

providing vitalization, cross platform integration, complete application

manageability through single source, and management and controllership through

best in class tools. This has provided the organization with flexibility,

interoperability, ability to implement vitalization, and identity management

fulfilling the primary objective of the organization.

Having 24X7 operations across all facilities, high availability

and uptime are the critical components. The company has two facilities each in

Mumbai and Hyderabad, and each of these are connected to the parent companys

facility in the US. The India-based WAN network is a DS3 (45 Mbps) mesh network

with all sites interconnected. In the case of one link failing, the path can be

ensured through manual routing to reach and connect all sites. Similarly, in

case any of the connecting ATM links (DS3) fail on the international site,

parallel links take the complete load and continue services until the affected

links come back in operations.

Anwer Bagdadi






Has worked
at:

  • Started his journey as

    shop floor engineer at New Standard Engineering

  • Shifted track to IT and

    joined Godrej & Boyce as a trainee computer programmer in 1979,

    and went on to become functional programming head

  • After working at Godrej

    & Boyce for 11 years, shifted to a JV between GE and GodrejGodrej

    GE Appliancesas CIO

  • Worked at Lawkim (a

    sister organization of Godrej) as VP

  • Joined Epicentre before

    joining CFC in 2004

Enjoys

doing:
Traveling

and reading (fiction and non-fiction) books on management and technology

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"Each time a failure would lead us to change routes

manually and apply them to operate network in an optimal way. The affected

segment would be unavailable for 40-60 minutes, thus we were working with a

network in 98-99% uptime but could not better the same," Bagdadi says.

Recently, the company implemented dynamic routing (OSPF protocol) between India

WAN areas and international WAN links. Dynamic routing resolves the availability

and uptime problem by constructing routing tables automatically, based on

information carried by routing protocols, and allowing the network to act nearly

autonomously in avoiding network failures and blockages. This has enabled an

automated fail-over for traffic between India and US or among the India WAN

sites. "Now we are able to pursue and achieve uptime and availability in

the range of 99.9% and above," he adds.

Balance in Life



With career completely overshadowing most of our personal space, Bagdadi too
had to face the dilemma of choosing his work over family. But, as is said, behind

every successful man there is a woman; he too was fortunate to have Fehmida

as his life partner who completely understood the demands of building a budding

career. A homemaker in the real sense, Fehmida has been Bagdadis sounding

board for all his ideas for the past 27 years of marriage. "Marriage is a

two-way street where empathy is a vital element to make it successful."

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Being always short on time means that the couple does not talk

shop, and travels for spending quality time together. Bonding with his two sonsDanish

studying computer engineering and Kashif, studying in class VIItops Bagdadis

priority list. "Both being in the growing stage, it is important for me to

spend quality time with them." Bagdadis spare time also sees him in a

new role, as a visiting faculty to colleges where he mentors students on their

future.

Stuti Das



stutid@cybermedia.co.in

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