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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.

Remain Small to be BIG

Jaya Smitha Menon
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Jaya Smitha Menon
Prashant Ranade was appointed CEO of Syntel in February 2010, after serving on Syntels Board
of Directors since 2007. Earlier, he served as President and CEO of Siemens Logistics & Assembly Systems. He has also held leadership positions at Rockwell Automation and Siemens AG, where he began his career over thirty years ago as an engineer, before working his way up to General Manager of its automation division. Throughout his career, Ranade has demonstrated outstanding leadership skills, the ability
to understand and translate new technologies into global product strategies, and deep domain knowledge in healthcare and life sciences, high-tech engineering and manufacturing, and supply chain and logistics automation. He holds a B.S. in Engineering from IIT Bombay, an M.S. from the University of Cincinnati, and an MBA from Xavier University, Cincinnati.


If you look at the past, IT was what I would call a glass house of technology where few technologists in a company just wrote lot of code. But later, the glass house was broken and it became a companywide phenomenon where integration, collaboration, and ensuring that various applications were interoperable became important. Today I look at it as IT shifting to ET(Enterprise Technology) where all of what I just described as IT plus connectivity of various devices and availability of data in real time and not just information but intelligence that can be acted upon and controlled. And this change of going from technology glass house to IT created a tremendous opportunities, I expect this IT moving to ET will create many more such opportunities. Then there are implications around this because now the process in technology is intertwined, meaning Knowledge Process Outsourcing plus technology, as now companies need to have end to end view of the business.

Going to ET will createa opportunity in every segment. What each company has to look at is the capability they currently have in a particular domain or particular industry, what they want to build and can build, what foot print they need to have and this will determine which areas will see growth. But clearly outside the most popular industries of today there will be opportunities in areas that are going to see significant changes, like clearly the power or utility companies, technology companies, manufacturing segments, retailers, how they operate, all these are going through major changes and becoming bigger users of IT compared to how they use it today.

Priorities as a CEO
My first priority is being able to remain who we are and grounded what has made us successful and I call it ‘remain small, to be big’. One of our strengths is that we are small enough to listen, we have direct connectivity with our client, and we understand their needs, aspirations, and pain points. So clearly as we are growing and becoming bigger in terms of employee strength and revenues, ensuring that we remain small to be connected with the clients and to each other internally.

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