‘We need to reap benefits from our India talent’

Addressing 4,000 of Cisco India’s 12,500 employees for an hour from Mumbai via video-conferencing on Thursday, Chairman and CEO John Chambers, said, “India is our second world headquarters, a source of great talent and expertise and not just a place for labour arbitrage. However, just 1.5 per cent of our business comes from India, which should be 5 per cent.”

“We need to get economic benefits out of our India talent. But if we continue to do things the way we did it all these years, it won’t work. We have to restructure the organisation starting with engineering and focusing on customers first to help them deliver business outcomes,” added Chambers.

Senior global leaders of the company, including Chief Globalisation Officer, Wim Elfrink; President for APJ, Irving Tan; and Head of Worldwide Sales, Chuck Robbins, are in India to meet key customers, partners and government officials along with Chambers.

Cisco’s India Head of sales, Dinesh Malkani, said India revenues would cross $1billion in FY 2015. “With that, we will get to 2 per cent of Cisco’s overall revenue in 2015,” he said in response to Chamber’s comment that Malkani was not on target to achieving his goal for next year.

Chambers met up with the heads of the State Bank of India, Tata, a Nasscom delegation of 30 CXOs and government leaders on Thursday morning. “All CEOs look at themselves as a technology company first. Cyrus Mistry, Chairman of Tata Sons, said they are an IT and digital company first. When I asked him about the number one challenge that he has been facing over the last 18 months since he took over, he said, “how do I keep up with the pace of change, how can I have my IT team at TCS deliver fast IT.”

“SBI and Tatas could potentially be $50 million to $100 million accounts a year for Cisco. Many of our customers in India are $5 million accounts which we are trying to grow to $6-8million. This could be $50-$100 million accounts for us if we help them deliver business outcomes,” added Chambers.

Stating that the entire Cisco India team could work together to lead transformation in India in everything — from agriculture to healthcare and education — Chambers said, “in an application-centric world, if we lead with application-centric architecture, we will definitely be the number one IT company in the world and India will play a key role in this. I expect our engineering team in India to lead the way here by aligning around customers, platforms and solutions and by adopting a horizontal approach to business.”

During the call, Chambers took time to recognise high achievers in engineering and sales in India. Fielding questions from employees across the country, Chambers said, “Cisco’s biggest competition is not from Avaya, Juniper, Arista or VMware; it will be from white-labelled servers, storage and network architecture that is gaining popularity.”

On a query about talent retention through better compensation, Chambers said, “our revenue productivity increase per employee was zero-flat for the last 10 years, which needs to change for us to be able to compensate employees and give our shareholders fair returns.”

On Cisco’s partnership with the new government, Chambers said, “I am meeting Govt leaders individually and in a group tomorrow, but my perception is very favourable. The new government has the courage to say that we are going to bring broadband, education and healthcare to the whole country. This is a huge opportunity for us. My gut feel is that I will walk out feeling very proud of the leadership in India and my ability to partner with them.

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