In his first interaction after taking over as President – Sales for Cisco’s India & SAARC operations, Dinesh Malkani, said that the company is focussed in the areas of education, broadband and e-governance.

Downplaying the recent spate of exits by top executives, Malkani said he was well positioned to make India the fastest growing market for Cisco again. Edited excerpts:

How do you see your appointment given the tough market conditions?

Timing could not have been better. The new Government is here and they have a mandate to transform the country.

I believe Cisco has an opportunity to help in the transformation process.

We have been working in a number of countries in the areas of education, broadband, e-governance, so I was delighted when I was chosen to lead India.

But Cisco has not been doing well globally and in India, in terms of revenue numbers.

If you look at our results we have been fairly steady. However, there have been ups and downs, many of emerging markets was challenging and currency devalued. There are also market forces and market transitions like the cloud.

Software-as-a-service is becoming lot more acceptable and customers are saying I want business outcome. So we came up with a plan. We are back in growth in US, we called out private cloud as big area of growth and we achieved it, we made significant share gains on data centre, server space. India is no different as adoption for cloud is increasing. Data is growing and that transition is coming in our direction.

What are your areas of priority?

First thing is we believe transformation projects in Government will open new opportunities for us. Broadband will be an area of focus. Education is another big area. We have done some local innovation for rural schools.

Second thing is commercial business where we have hundreds of accounts, but we have to move outside tier-1 and -2 cities. We are working with distributors to go and capture markets outside of main cities.

We have come with new products that cater to that market. We are launching new set of low-cost routers that’s made in India.

What’s your plan to move to tier-2 and -3 cities?

Our product portfolio is right but go to market will be different. I have identified four key distributors with thousands of partners under their wing.

We will co-invest in that area for training and recruiting. This is a big part of 2015 plan. Even if there is a $2,000 deal, we will go after it through low-cost model.

Cisco India has not been able to achieve its revenue target in the services space. Are you concerned?

We have really evolved our service business. We used go into account to do basic things but today we have end-to-end contracts.

Yes, there is a potential to grow it. It’s a demand and supply situation because our customers are saying it’s not about products but business outcomes.

I cannot achieve without service playing a big part in the transformation from selling boxes to solution to business outcome.

There has been a spate of exits. Does that indicate failure to achieve targets?

We have lowest attrition rates in IT companies. People will, of course, leave but you have to keep it within certain range.

We don’t want to lose top talent. Different people leave for different reasons.

Market share is real indicator of how business is performing. In six out of eight categories, we gained market share.

In FY 2013, we were the fastest growing country in the world and we want to sustain that.

But the sudden appointments and change in leadership add to the speculation that something’s not right.

I have spent one and half years extremely close with Jeff White (former India head).

The succession was planned. India is important country for us. We can’t make haphazard decisions. The company has invested in training me in this role.

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