The Hindu Business Line : Building leadership helps us grow: Satyam chief

Hyderabad, Nov. 7 Traversing 20 eventful summers since its start-up days, the country’s fourth largest IT services provider, Satyam Computer Services Ltd, is poised for $2 billion in revenues and hitting 50,000 associates mark.

As it embarks on the next phase of growth, the Founder Chairman, Mr B. Ramalinga Raju, is bullish on the company’s future and believes that building leadership and change management have been the key differentiator.

From revenues of $1 billion to $2 billion, the company is poised to achieve it in 24 months, the fastest among IT peers. If this is any indication, doubling of revenues and headcount looks quite natural for the management given the healthy pipeline. Refraining to make any forward looking statements, Mr Raju explained how the company looks to the future.

You are a $2 billion revenue company now. What is your strategy going forward?

The $2-billion revenue speaks of size now. And in some respects it is important because we compete with large global players. The overall market capitalisation is also an important measure of the company and within system integrators, we rank among the top 10 globally. What is gratifying is that half of the companies in that list are Indian organisations in some form or the other. Therefore, the role of Indian companies in the industry has become significant.

We have all through focused on building competencies on a scale that provides us the platform to compete with global players. The nature and scope of the engagements are becoming bigger and broad based.

Have you set new goals?

What we are discovering being a young company is that to expand strategically it is quite advantageous. Younger companies are able to better manage change. Having majority of employees in the younger age group makes us lot more nimble.

The pace at which the IT industry is growing, was your growth driven by design or just happened?

This has been a design-led change and a concerted effort within the company to build leadership. And this has in turn helped create the platform to manage such change. This can be understood from the fact that Satyam has been rated the World’s No. 1 training and development organisation by The American Society for Training and Development (ASTD), a vindication of efforts to build leaders. Satyam is the only one from Asia in this list.

How do you see the sector business in future?

World today is very different from yesterday. The information technology revolution has fundamentally changed the manner in which wealth is created and services delivered. These have the potential to further simplify processes and streamline work and life.

In my opinion, we are still at an early stage of taking full advantage of technology through various applications. Changes are so profound that IT services and business process outsourcing applications will converge.

However, what is not certain is whether companies based in India would be able to reap benefits of outsourcing of these services given the competition from other markets. The key message is we have to learn to deal with change and accelerate learning.

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