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Follow Us“A whole decade has come to an end and we still dont know
what to call it! It's not a new dilemma: it comes every 100 years and
yet after two millennia we still havent solved the problem.”
Anil
Dharker
Whether we call it 'noughties' or nothing this has been a decade when
Indian IT has seen progress not witnessed in the last half a century.
Naturally, selecting ten personalities who had the maximum inpact is
not just an onerous but almost impossible task. And naturally there
will be lot of arguments and debates; and we will still not arrive at a
consensus. The only logic as Dataquest we will like to forward are that
we have tried spanning across all sectors, be it hardware, software,
services, e-gov, channel and else. And the fact that more than five of
them are recepients of at least either the Dataquest IT Person of the
Year or Pathbreaker awards during this decade bears ample testimony
that our selection does have some merit.
Here, in the final instalment, we present ten personalities shaped
up
Indian IT in the noughties.
1. Krishnan Jaishankar: The
Channel King
The biggest channel event
of the decade was when the #2 channel vendor acquired the #1 vendor to
create a behemoth of a distributor; it happened in 2004 when
Ingram
Micro acquired
Pacific—the new Ingram
ended up being the mother of
all resellers. Once the blockbuster merger got over, the need of the
hour was to identify the right person to oversee the transition and
handhold the entire cultural synergy. That man was
Jaishankar, the
former CEO of Tech Pacific, who in 2004 took over the reins of the
merged entity, Ingram Micro India.
distribution houses was no mean task. Working out their synergies,
identifying business divisions through product groups, integrating the
team and leveraging the presence--it involved intense brain storming
and close coordination. And this is where Jaishankar played the stellar
role; after all he was handling almost all the leading tech vendors in
the country including Intel, HP, Samsung and HCL among others. Another
major challenge in the initial years for the new entity was the rapid
rise of eSys. Taking advantage of the confusion caused by the merger,
eSys was rapidly gaining grounds at the expense of Ingram Micro.
However, Jaishankar was steadfast and still managed to retain the core
principals; subsequently, when the eSys bubble fizzled out, Ingram
Micro managed to retain its top position and start growing again. align="left">Jaishankar took utmost
care to ensure that the integration leads to a strong team at Ingram
Micro India. They subsequently had a much larger team with clearly
defined roles, up to the branch level, focusing on specific product
lines and business functions. Not only that, having realized that
linear growth is no more possible to sustain long time, he ensured that
the company moves into non-IT products, particularly taking advantage
of the mobile boom the country witnessed in the last few years.
2.
Manoj Chugh: The Inveterate Salesman
has been the suave marketing guru who redefined the business fortunes
of two MNCs over the last decade. When he joined Cisco in the late 90s,
it was just another networking vendor competing with the likes of 3Com,
Enterasys, Bay Networks and Extreme. By the time he quit Cisco in 2003,
not only was it the undisputed leader in networking, but had more than
three times the market share. In fact, so dominant had Cisco become in
India during that time, no one still comes anywhere close to it even
after nearly seven years. Even more spectacular has been his stint an
EMC: when he joined in 2003, it had a small liasion office in India
with hardly any revenues worth its name. Today
is not just the storage leader in India, with its overall storage,
security (through RSA) and virtualization (thorough Vmware) portfolio,
it is now one the biggest tech vendors in the country.
Not only did Chugh enhance EMC business by strengthening his
relationships with business partners, he helped EMC foray into
verticals like telecom and technology where traditionally they had
barely registered. (maybe his Cisco legacy helped in that case) Over
this period, EMC has grown by over 500%. Under Manoj's leadership, EMC
committed to invest over $500 million in the market by 2010 and a major
part of that has already taken place. Most of this has gone not just in
increasing EMC revenues, but also in enancing the EMC India Centre of
Excellence team in Bangalore—along with its head Sarv
Saravanan,
Chugh has ensured a One EMC voice to the market and more than 3,000
employees in India. Earlier in Cisco too, he more than tripled the
organization's revenue and positioned Cisco as the market leader across
diverse verticals in the networking segment. In May 2008, he was
promoted to the newly created position of leading EMC's Global Accounts
program in APJ, a role that he continues to hold. Nevertheless, when
Alok Ohrie quit as EMC India head few months back, he was given the
dual responsibility of India too—that's Chugh's brand equity
in
the EMC setup.
So what has been the secret behind Chugh's success? Some people
attribute it to his marketing skills, others to his excellent PR while
others believe it to be cut-throat sales skills acquired in Wipro and
HCL—two of India's best nurturing grounds for sales
personnel.
There are some critics who complain that much of Chugh's success owes
to his excellent equation with the media, but it's hard to believe that
could have taken him this far, especially with toplines and
bottomlines. Rather, it's more a combination of all these skills that
has made Chugh the champion he is. And don't always go by that smiling
visage—this author saw the hard taskmaster in him when he
told
one events head that “if you were in my company, today you
would
have lost your job.”
3.
Pramod Bhasin: The Face of Indian BPO
Bhasin's story though the decade
is not just the story of the
transformation of GE to Genpact. Rather, in one way, his story also
sums up the strategic journey of the Indian BPO sector. From the pomp
of the captives in the 90s (American Express and GE started the
revolution) and early 2000s to the gradual rise of the third parties
and the emergence of an integrated IT-BPO player. The metamorphosis
from GECIS to today's Genpact under Bhasin's tutelage therefore mirrors
India's BPO journey through a decade. If
Raman Roy is the father of
Indian BPO, Bhasin arguably is the torchbearer or better still the face
of the BPO decade.
The metamorphosis from the largest captive BPO to the largest third
party BPO player was not achieved in one stroke though. GE Capital
International Services (GECIS) was established by GE in late 1997 as
its captive India based BPO. GE sold 60% stake in GECIS to General
Atlantic and Oak Hill Capital Partners in 2005 and subsequently hived
off Genpact into an independent business. Not only did Bhasin help
Genpact step out of GE's shadow, he guided it through its listing in
2007. Beyond Genpact too, Bhasin as the face of Indian BPO has been at
the vanguard of Indian IT; he took over his current stint as Nasscom
Chairman right in the Satyam aftermath.
Under Bhasin's guidance, Genpact has so many firsts to its credit that
some of them often do not receive adequate attention; its emergence as
a dual BPO and IT services provider would certainly count high on this
list. There was a time when IT services players talked about integrated
IT-BPO play. Genpact came from the other side of the fence and
successfully showed that it could do that too, with a quarter of its
revenues now coming from IT services. And while Bhasin nurtured the
baby when GE spawned it, in its adulthood he has been instrumental in
reducing the GE dependence. Today Genpact has got an
impressive list
of clients like Nissan, GlaxoSmithKline, Wachovia, BUPA, BT Financial
Group and Honeywell.
4.
Vineet Nayar: The Differentiator Who Found his Niche
Though CEO
Nayar could take maximum credit
for elevating HCL
Tech to the
sextet or WITCH (with Satyam becoming Mahindra
Satyam and falling out of the club), he has never been the darling of
the Fifth Estate like a Narayan Murthy, Azim Premji or a Nandan
Nilekani. Forget others, he has not even received the same adulation as
a Shiv Nadar or an Ajai Chowdhry from his own group. Nevertheless,
under his tutelage HCL in this decade has become a global name in the
offshore outsourcing map; his strategy to make HCL different (after all
it had no option with Infosys, TCS and Wipro ruling the roost) has paid
off in large measures with HCLT today considered to be a leader in the
space of infrastructure management as well as SAP integration.
It was quite early in the decade that Nayar identified the potential of
management—he
pioneered the Remote Delivery Model and a
strong process based on ITIL and as a result many global analyst firms
today rank HCL Tech as the #1 in the RIM space. (RIM) is one of the
business engines for HCL, which showed year-on-year growth of 120% in
remote infrastructure services in Europe alone over 2006. The Indian
provider has a modest number of delivery and support centers but has a
strong process based on ITIL and a clear vision and road map for
service enhancement. This positions HCL as a promising company in RIM
and the highest-ranked Indian offshore firm in this market. RIM is now
one of the main business engines for HCL; in fact, it showed
year-on-year growth of 120% in Europe alone over the last few years.
The acquisition of
in 2008 (the largest acquisition in the Indian
IT sector) that catapulted HCLT to the top league as an SAP integrator
was another feather in Nayar's cap. As the leading global SAP
implementor now, it looks like HCLT is now threatening to steal away a
portion of the high value SAP installation market from Western
outsourcers. Even on the BPO front, Nayar was one of the early birds to
realise the potential of volume work for European market with direct
presence there. HCL BPO was one of the first to set up call centers in
Belfast; today it has one of the largest presence in Northern Ireland
to address European customers. Nayar's differetiation strategy extended
beyond RIM, SAP and call center also to niche verticals like aerospace
and engineering services where too HCL has carved out its space.
5.
Sanjeev Bikhchandani: The Internet Entrepreneur
If Rediff was the pioneering Indian dotcom venture, it was Naukri that
best epitomized the journey of an Indian online entity over the last
decade. Being launched in 1998, Naukri went through the dotcom boom,
the subsequent bust-up and finally the transformation post 2002 when
not only it bulit up a viable business nodel but redefined the Indian
job market dynamics altogether.
Sanjeev Bikhchandani, the man
behind it
all, therefore surely deserves to be in the list of decade's
destiny-makers; after all, not only has Naukri become almost synonymous
with job search, Bikhchandani is now an acknowledged pathbreaker in the
Internet domain.
After launching
in 1997, continuing losses for
two years made
him go the VC way. This coincided with the dotcom frenzy and also saw
competition with numerous other jobsites coming up around the same
time. However, even when many of them went kaput during the dotcom bust
Bikhchandani did not lost track—there was no question of
closing down
Naukri. In fact, the visionary in him had foreseen that the online job
market will become big during the decade; true to that, the Monsters
and Dices came in, but Naukri was still able to hold on to its top
spot.
Under his leadership Naukri became the first website to get listed on
the Indian stock exchange in 2006, a total vindication that the online
model does work in case there is a viable business model. However, his
zeal for doing more forward looking projects did not end with Naukri.
He went on to launch more popular sites in the Internet space,
including Jeevansathi.com and 99acres.com—two more popular
areas onlike
like matrimonial and real estate. Not only is Bikhchandani a successful
Internet entrepreneur, he redefined the complete online business model
for India during this decade.
6.
Kiran
Karnik: The IT Man of the Decade
When Nasscom founder president
Mehta passed away untimely in
April 2001 at Sydney, the question everyone asked was, after Dewang
who? Once the subsequent headhunt undertaken by IT industry veterans
for a new Nasscom president zeroed in on Kiran Karnik after a few
months, the question on everyone's lip was, Kiran who? Though
had a chequered career with ISRO and finally launching Discovery
Channel in India, his exposure to IT was negligible. The general
consensus was that not only would Karnik stumble on carrying forward
Dewang's legacy, but by the time he gains some knowledge on Indian IT
services dynamics, Nasscom itself would become defunct or redundant as
an association.
The affable, mild-mannered Karnik however proved all the detractors and
doubting Thomases wrong. Though his Nasscom stint did not require the
extensive lobbying that Dewang indulged in, he guided the Indian
services ship through some choppy waters. One big crisis was prior to
the US Presidential Elections of 2004 when John Kerry had managed to
raise the anti-outsourcing pitch to a crescendo, the mood amongst
Indian software service providers was downbeat. And it was Karnik-led
Nasscom's efforts around the globe that helped Indian companies tide
over that crisis.
But Karnik's role at Nasscom cannot be just looked at as a crisis
manager; if Dewang had started an association and given it the global
image, Karnik helped in making it an organization. While many blamed
Nasscom as the exclusive club for the Big Five, during Karnik's reign
new initiatives like SME forum, one involving educational
institutes (to tackle the manpower shortage), gender diversity program,
anti-poaching agreement among BPOs and a national database of employees
were conceived. Unfortunately, the last two never materialized
successfully but that should not detract from Karnik's achievement.
And even post-Nasscom, the Indian IT's crisis man of the hour was
called back again to head the government appointed board to retrieve
the Satyam situation. The fiasco had threatened to not just finish off
one company, but undermine all the efforts of Indian IT services
industry for the last two decades. The Karnik-led board however
motivated and managed to retain most of the Satyam workforce during the
troubled times, ensured that most customers stayed back, abided with
all regulatory and investigative bodies and mechanisms in India and US,
successfully found a new respectable owner Tech Mahindra through a fair
and transparent bidding process and created a new model for corporate
governance in India. For his illustrious role in building upon Dewang's
efforts at Nasscom and for saving the face of Indian IT globally, Kiran
Karnik is arguably the “the Indian IT Man of the
Decade.”
7.
Nandan
Nilekani: From Flat World to Imagining Unique India
One man who ran Karnik close to being Indian IT's “Man of the
Decade” is the chairman of the Unique ID (UID) Authority of
India set up under the aegis of the Planning Commission and the former
CEO and co-founder of Infosys, Nandan Nilekani. It was in March 2002
that he took over as Infosys CEO from the iconic Narayana Murthy and
presided over some unique milestones for the company. Overseeing Infy's
biggest ever acquisition (Australian telecom services vendor Expert) in
2003, touching the billion dollar topline mark in 2004, then
subsequently $2bn and $3bn in 2006 and 2007...., expanding its global
delivery model across newer geographies-Nilekani could take
credit for many of Infy achievements during the decade.
On a more strategic level, if
Murthy could be credited for
leading the entrepreneur-founder in the 90s to lay the foundation for a
scalable Infosys, Nilekani led Infosys 2.0 during the noughties in
grooming the next-gen leaders, empowering them and creating career
plans for them till he handed over reins to Kris Gopalakrishnan in
2007. He devised the theory of organizational longevity that focused on
creating a set of leaders such that “collectively they were
capable and individually they were more capable in some of the
things.” (reinstating the Infosys principle of the sum being
more equal than the parts). Another leadership trait in Nilekani that
shone through the decade was his ability to connect dots at various
levels and then correlating it to present the big picture along with a
strategy to match. Nothing illustrates better throughout the decade
than his obsession with creating the longevity of the corporation-going
beyond generations of leaders-while continuing to thrive, prosper and
retain its value and culture, the basic DNA.
But it would be demeaning to Nilekani to restrict his contribution only
to the growth of his own company. As one of the global faces of Indian
IT, he has performed stellar role for associations like Nasscom and TiE
(he founded the Bangalore chapter); in fact nothing could illustrate
his global image better than when Tom Friedman acknowledged him to be
the inspiration and the face behind The World is Flat (arguably the
business book of the decade). Accolades like Forbes
“Businessman of the Year” for Asia (2006), Fortune
“Businessman of the Year” for Asia (2003) as well
as being one of the youngest entrepreneurs to joing Global Top 20
leaders on the World Economic Forum Foundation in 2006
further enhanced his image as India's face on the global business map.
In 2009, he was placed in the Time 100 list of “World's Most
Influential People”. The icing on the cake was the Padma
Bhushan in 2006.
But again, it would be erroneous to judge Nilekani only as a business
champion. After all this is one man who admits that he has been
unusually lucky to achieve so much success. While his personal
aspirations are fulfilled, his larger public goal is to contribute in
whatever way he can to help India take advantage of this
“historical opportunity. “India
is unusually placed to do well in terms of outsourcing, demographics
and the global economy. This is something that comes to a country once
in a millennium.” (from his 2009 book Imagining
India) And in 2009, he walked the talk by quitting his plum position in
Infosys to become the chairperson of the unique ID authority
at Manmohan Singh's behest where he enjoys the rank of a Cabinet
Minister. The UID program will provide an identity card/number to every
citizen like the Social Security system in US and Europe; to lead a
project of such magnitude it's almost impossible India could have found
anyone else.
8.
Subramaniam
Ramadorai: Ta-ta, Indian IT's Silent Warrior
In a career spanning three decades at TCS,
Ramadorai has lived the life of
the Indian IT industry-if the first two decades were spent
more on first building and then growing the organization, the first
decade of the century saw him overseeing the DNA transmutation that TCS
underwent in the last few years. Without even delving into such
quasi-strategic areas, Ram's achievements during the noughties would be
more than what a lesser mortal would achieve in one lifetime. He was
the force behind the CMC acquisition in 2001 and its integration into
the TCS fold; he would do the same again with Tata Infotech in 2006.
And as part of his grandiose global delivery model with platform
offerings, he engineered the acquisitions of Comicron, Pearl BPO, AFS
and FNS amongst others.
In between, he drew TCS out of the closet and confines of a
privately-held company and with the help and consent of Tata
Sons, led it into being a publicly listed company. The listing in
itself was a much-awaited landmark event, and it catapulted Ram to the
full glare of the media and the investor community when the IPO was
announced in 2004. Infosys has always been the darling of the investors
and analysts, but gradually he changed the image of TCS post-IPO as it
gradually gained mindshare across communities. It was again in 2004 (a
pivotal year for both TCS and Ram) that it became the first Indian IT
services company to touch the billion dollar mark. That gave rise to
even bigger dreams-that of achieving $10bn by 2010 (ten by
ten); though TCS fell well short, even as Ram handed over the baton to
Chandra in 2009, TCS is a $7bn company employing over 1,10,000 people.
Forget IT, how many Indian companies from any sector you can name
having that sort of workforce? Apart from some PSUs, the railways, and
the defence, how many CEOs have to manage
On top if you add that this workforce comprises people of 67
nationalities across 47 countries spread across the globe, Ram's
achievement is reflected in the true perspective. And to ensure that
TCS still continues to grow against global benchmarks. This clearly
called for new measures to culturally integrate people, to measure
their performance and productivity levels, design reward and appraisal
processes. Further, business processes needed to be fine-tuned to
extract maximum productivity and efficiency. Through the use of
technology and process measures, Ram and his team have been able to
manage the organization scale-up in terms of people and revenues and
profitability. Clearly a garagantuan task achieved by a man who has
perenially remained in the shadows of other CEOs of some of his closest
competitors.
This global spread helped TCS absorb much of the slowdown impact too.
After all, under Ram the company has established businesses in diverse
geographies like South America (Chile, Ecuador, Uruguay) to Australia
to Sweden. Add to it a thriving domestic business pepped up by the CMC
and Tata Infotech acquisitions-TCS is a particularly strong
name in Indian e-governance handling marquee projects like MCA 21 and
Passport Seva. The downturn in US would get offset by business from
some other geography. Even as he enhanced the company's global model
and made TCS the crowning jewel of the Tata empire, his lasting legacy
was handpicking and subsequently grooming Chandra as the future captain
of the TCS ship.
9.
Neelam
Dhawan: The First Lady of Indian IT
Gender diversity, corporate female emancipation, breaking the glass
ceiling are issues hotly debated in Indian IT today. While women CEOs
are not rare a species in India Inc. any more, the situation was
different at the turn of the century, especially in the IT sector. In
light of what transpired during this decade, you have to salute the
achievements of
Dhawan, who headed not one, but
the India operations of two of the world's largest technology companies
during this decade. The noughties started with Dhawan in Compaq (after
nearly two decades in the otright male bastion of sales &
marketing at HCL and IBM); subsequently after HP acquired Compaq, she
moved to a senior position in HP. In 2005, she quit HP and joined as
head of Microsoft India; three years hence in 2008 it was homecoming to
HP, now as its India head.
Looking dispassionately at Dhawan's achievements shorn of the gender
glasses, the results have been spectacular. Her two years at Microsoft
has seen the company growing steadily at 26%; in fact Microsoft lost
way in FY09 subsequent to Neelam's departure. Though the slowdown is
cited as the principal factor impacting Microsoft business in India,
who knows what could have happened if Neelam had remained at its
Gurgaon headquarters. In fact, geographically she has just moved across
the road, with HP headquarters too being at Gurgaon. Though her first
year in charge had seen stagnancy in HP (coinciding with the economic
downturn), the TSG arm (services) which she separately headed grew
spectacularly at 33%. The addition of MphasiS (currently finctioning as
an independent company) would make the services portfolio even bigger.
Her biggest contribution at TSG has been smoothly and seamlessly
integrating the EDS operations and leveraging that acquisition to
bolster the HP business. And even more crucially in troubled times for
PSG and IPG, somehow ensuring that the three entities work in unison in
India and losses suffered at two of them are somewhat offset by the
roaring successes of TSG. It's extremely difficult to manage these
three separate entities of HP-after all they function almost
as different companies. And in a slowdown year when dip in consumer
business badly affected IPG and PSG, maintaining that co-ordinating
status quo was an even bigger challenge. In Microsoft too, she presided
over the hi-profile Vista and Xbox launches in India, ensured Microsoft
business took off big time among the government (14 states beating off
the Linux challenge) and even launching a Windows-Linux
interoperability lab in Bengaluru in line with changing realities.
However, it's futile to look at Neelam Dhawan's achievements only by
numbers and milestones. The Chandra Kocchhars and Naina Kidwais may
have received more newsprint and primetime space being in the banking
sector (more understandable to the aam aadmi), but Dhawan's record of
heading Microsoft and HP within a decade is phenomenal not just as a
woman, but as any business leader. And that too in a country where
women still voluntarily sacrifice their professional careers at the
behest of husband and children; obviously having an understanding
husband and mother-in-law (who quit her job to look after her children)
helped. Dhawan, after all, is not just another woman or another IT
leader of the decade; she is the benchmark for the professional Indian
woman of the next decade.
10.
R
Chandrasekhar: The Father of Indian e-Gov
E-governance is 20% 'e' and 80% 'governance'. So says R Chandrashekhar.
He should know. After all, he is the man driving it all. And has been
doing it relentlessly throughout the decade. His sojourn with
e-governance started in Andhra Pradesh; when Chandrababu Naidu was
defining the e-gov paradigm for India and turning Hyderabad into
'Cyberabad', Chandrasekhar was Naidu's Man Friday. He was the man who
established the first Department of Information Technology in the
country in Andhra Pradesh, and also heralded some of the most
innovative and path-breaking efforts including the public-private
partnership (PPP) concept in e-governance projects. He was the Andhra
IT Secretary till December '99 (strictly speaking his contribution then
shouldn't count in the noughties) but during his stint as CMD of AP
Industrial Infrastructure Corporation he pioneered the HITEC city
project on a PPP model.
During his stint in Andhra Pradesh, other than HITEC city
Chandrashekhar is also credited with the conceptualization, planning
and implementation of various key initiatives including the setting up
of the IIIT in Hyderabad and evolving a comprehensive policy framework
for the adoption of IT in governance. The comprehensive framework drawn
up by him helped in catapulting the state to the forefront of IT
development in the country-previously e-gov was just a
concept and was restricted to procuring computers for specific
departments. Pioneering the concept, Andhra Pradesh's IT revolution set
the tone for e-governance in India and emerged as a role model for the
other states. That way, it would not be an exaggeration to annoit
Chandrasekhar as the 'father of e-governance' in India.
From 2002 onwards first as Joint Secretary (e-governance), Department
of IT, and now finally as Secretary, he has been applying his Andhra
learnings on a national scale. He has been responsible in this capacity
for formulation of national polices, agendas, strategies and action
plans for e-Gov. The plum of the pudding was his role in developing the
National e-Governance Plan (NeGP); equally important has been his role
in building the national framework on CSC and SWAN as well as driving
the evolution of the concept of integrated service delivery in
e-governance projects. While most of these projects were conceived
during the first UPA regime, the momentum slowed down a year prior to
the elections. It has again picked up in 2009 with the second UPA reign
firmly established; and Chandrasekhar now as the secretary has been the
catalyst in driving this acceleration.
That Chandrasekhar has served under the NDA regime as well as two UPA
regime, not to mention Chandrababu Naidu (who is now the 'invisible'
third front) not only proves his longevity, but also that his strong
administrative track record transcends all sorts of political
allegiance. In India, bureaucrats are often transferred whenever there
is a change in political regime-Chandrasekhar has been a
notable exception. He admits that while there are a lot of procedural
barriers he has had to work with throughout this decade, there are
leeways also and one has to learn to find innovative ways of doing
things. At the same time the man says he was fortunate that there was
room for experimentation and he operated at a time in the noughties
when the changes and experimentations are possible and supported by the
system.