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The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.

October - 2006 - issue > Executive of The Month

Holmes' second coming

Aritra Bhattacharya
Thursday, October 5, 2006
Aritra Bhattacharya
Sherlock Holmes has a new address. In his latest avatar as Manish Sinha, the master of disguise, has taken up residence in Bangalore. He leads a team of over 1500 engineers spanning the continents, and strives to alert them of the importance of symptoms in reaching a solution.

It’s a departure from the earlier incarnation, but that’s also true for the field and scale of operation. As the General Manager of Customer Service and Support (CSS) at Microsoft (MS) for the Asia-Pacific Region, his decisions affect not just those within the periphery of the above-mentioned geographic boundaries, but even those who reside down under.

Sinha was entrusted with the responsibility of keeping Microsoft’s Global Technical Support Center (GTSC) in Bangalore up and about in August 2004. It makes him responsible to administer a fair share of the one billion incidences (technology related problems) Microsoft CSS centers across the world handle in a year.

“In the event of an IT problem in any company, they’ll throw all their resources to fix it,” he says. Only when the tried and tested methods fail, people call up the GTSC. As a result, engineers under Sinha always need to be on their toes. The team has to understand the client’s environment, recreate it in the GTSC, experiment to reach a solution and hand it back to the customer.

The entire process has to wrapped up in a matter of minutes as it deals with mission-critical problems. A delay on their part could mean unending harassment for the client’s customers. To that end, gauging the symptoms is very important. “You need to be the Sherlock Holmes of Technology,” quips Sinha.
“Sometimes it takes 400-500 minutes to solve a problem,” he says.

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