The 10 Who Shaped the Decade

“A whole decade has come to an end and we still don't know what to call it! It's not a new dilemma, it comes every 100 years and yet after two millennia, we still haven't solved the problem” -Anil Dharker

That was the dilemma we faced last year at the end of 2009. Many people called it the 'noughties' and celebrated the end of this century's first decade. There's another school of thought, who believes the first 21st century decade could end only with 2010. Obviously, the differing perceptions are based on different starting points for the initial year-either 2000 or 2001. Whether we consider the 'noughties' or the 2001-10 timeframe might be a matter of debate, but there is a consensus that this has been a decade when the Indian IT has seen progress not witnessed in the last half a century. Naturally, selecting 10 personalities who had the maximum impact during such a defining decade 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 DQ Channels, we will like to forward is that we have tried spanning across all sectors, be it hardware, software, services, e-gov and else.

Kiran Karnik: The IT Man of the Decade

When NASSCOM Founder and President, Dewang Mehta passed away untimely in April 2001 at Sydney, the question everyone asked was, who after Dewang? Once the subsequent headhunt undertaken by the IT industry veterans zeroed in on Kiran Karnik after a few months, the question on everyone's lips was, Kiran who? Though Karnik had a chequered career with ISRO, and finally having launched 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 the 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.'

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 $2 billion and $3 billion 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 Narayana 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. Another leadership trait in Nilekani that
shown 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 Bengaluru 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 join 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, he 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, now called AADHAR with its first set of cards now coming out, will provide an identity card/number to every citizen like the social security system in the US and Europe; to lead a project of such magnitude, it's almost impossible India could have found anyone else.

Subramaniam Ramadorai: Ta-ta, Indian IT's Silent Warrior

In a career spanning three decades at TCS, Subramaniam 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 $10 billion by 2010 (ten by ten); though TCS fell well short, even as Ram handed over the baton to Chandra in 2009. TCS is a $7 billion 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 defense, 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 perennially 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 and 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 the 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.

Neelam Dhawan:

The First Lady of the Indian IT

Gender diversity, corporate female emancipation, breaking the glass ceiling are issues hotly debated in the Indian IT today. While women CEOs are not a rare 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 Neelam 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 male bastion of sales and 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 percent; in fact Microsoft lost way in FY '09 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 percent. The addition of MphasiS (currently functioning as an independent company) would make the services portfolio even bigger. And her second year at HP saw overall numbers brightening up further.

Her biggest contribution at TSG (now called Enterprise Business or EB) 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 prime time 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.

R Chandrasekhar: The Father of Indian e-gov

e-Governance is 20 percent 'e' and 80 percent 'governance', so says R Chandrashekhar. He should know. After all, he was the man driving it all. And has done 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 then finally as Secretary, he was applying his Andhra learnings on a national scale. He was 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 again picked up in 2009 with the second UPA reign firmly established; and Chandrasekhar now as the secretary was the catalyst in driving this acceleration. There could not have been any better proof of the pudding when a few months back, Chandrasekhar was moved from the Department of IT to being the telecom secretary-after all in these times of Raja-Gate and Radia-Gate when the stock of telecom is on shaky grounds, who better can chart it out to safer grounds. 2G or not 2G, Chandrasekhar will do it ji.

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.

Pramod Bhasin: The Face of Indian BPO

Pramod 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 percent 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.

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 built up a viable business model 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 path-breaker in the Internet domain.

After launching Naukri 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 job sites 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. 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.Not only is Bikhchandani a successful Internet entrepreneur, he redefined the complete online business model for India during this decade.

Manoj Chugh: The Inveterate Salesman

He 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 of 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 liaison office in India with hardly any revenues worth its name. Today, EMC 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 percent. 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 enhancing the EMC India Center 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. 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. And don't always go by that smiling visage-this author saw the hard taskmaster in him when he told one events head of an event-management firm that “if you were in my company, today you would have lost your job.”

Azim Premji: Philanthropist First, Businessman Later

After the Gujarat violence in 2002, when the Western media was projecting Indian society as a communally-divided one, Azim Premji took every opportunity to clarify that India was far more liberal and secular than even the United States, quoting cases of his being profiled in the US airports because of his Muslim first name. Many business leaders have highlighted India's specific strengths in global forums, but few have proclaimed their pride in being Indian as explicitly and as convincingly as Premji has.

Azim Premji means different things to different people: a visionary, a world class manager, a symbol of modesty, simplicity and austerity, a great philanthropist (note his recent contribution of more than Rs 8,000 crore through his Azim Premji Foundation towards education) and whether one likes it or not, the label of the most successful Muslim entrepreneur in the world (as the World Street Journal described him). And not for small measures, he is the third richest man in India, after the two Ambani brothers, and for one time during the decade he was the world's third richest man too.

As one of the richest Indians, Premji could well hire chartered flightjet but he mostly travels economy class and does not mind getting into the front seat of a junior colleague's car. While he was critical of the Gujarat violence, he ensured that the global media does not project this exception to portray Indian society. So, at the same time, he was speaking against the Gujarat violence at home, he was reiterating to the Western media that India, by far, stands as a society that is pluralistic, liberal and secular.

His Azim Premji Foundation, a not-for-profit organization established in 2001, with a vision to significantly contribute to achieve quality universal education. What makes Premji extraordinary is that he drives all these personally, even while being active in business.

Vineet Nayar: The Differentiator Who Found his Niche

Though CEO Vineet Nayar could take maximum credit for elevating HCL Tech to the SWITCH 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 infrastructure 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 YoY growth of 120 percent 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.

The acquisition of Axon 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. Even on the BPO front, Nayar was one of the early birds to realize the potential of volume work for European market with direct presence there. Nayar's differentiation 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.

Rajneesh De
(rajneeshd@cybermedia.co.in)