Ram Mynampati, President, Satyam North Americas [NYSE:SAY, market cap: $2.72b], was the keynote speaker at the recent siliconindia CIO Perspective Breakfast session at New York. A member of the company’s senior management since 1999, Mynampati brings over two decades of technology management experience with him. He has been a influential presence in the IT services environment here. In a conversation with him, siliconindia explored issues that cross his desk, as the Satyam leader in the U.S.

On Satyam Evolution
Satyam has changed in many ways in the last five years. The change that stands out is that it has grown from being a global services company to a global company. We are no longer an India-based IT outsourcing service provider; our competition realizes that. This is important because the global culture and its contained mindset are what will pull up our team and business to the international arena. Our operational strategies will be based on this culture.

No longer are issues like cost of service, quality of delivery or operational maturity valuable differentiators—the industry itself has matured beyond these issues. Customers are now requiring true business partners—are we ready to understand the client business, our customers’ customers?

As a business partner, we need to help our customers in their business leadership—market leadership, operational efficiencies, maintaining continued leadership that was gained in the past and so on. We can no longer limit ourselves as a service provider; the changing market demands that we change into responsive, responsible business partners. Now this is easier said than done.

Clearly we are not there yet. Satyam is putting plans in place for the global company status—global presence, truly global workforce, viable worldwide delivery models and so on.For a company that is less than two decades old, we are happy with our size, capabilities, and have justified the shareholder’s belief in us. But we have so much more room to grow.

Next Steps
Satyam has been very successful in reading the market ahead of time and proactively build expertise in the emerging fields. Today, the technology investments alone are going to be insufficient. We need to invest in the business value of IT.

We are building alliances with strategic product and technology companies that will help all of us grow our expertise, efficiencies, and customer management efforts. Satyam Renaissance is a case in point—perhaps one of our best kept secrets [laughs]. We had invested in the business consulting space long before an IBM acquired a PWC, or an Accenture had entered the IT services space. Satyam’s efforts at being a truly verticalized company is now paying off.

The challenge for us is now choosing further business partners. If you can take away the pain of demonstrating what the technology can do for the customer, and deliver a business solution instead, the customer will obviously be delighted. It calls for significant investments from us to work with these technologies, all the while keeping an eye on how we could exploit them.

Market Convergence
The market is in an interesting convergence. The IBMs and Accentures are making substantial moves into the services space, leveraging their consulting experience. Satyam is building stronger consulting practises to leverage the services strengths. Down the years, there can be only a finite number of players in the business. Now, everybody can get there. What is going to differentiate the good ones is how quickly can one get there.

Quantum Leap to Leadership
As a 15,000-plus strong workforce company, we see the imminent need for a quantum leap that would propel us into the leadership position. Now this could be achieved by different methods—acquisitions, increasing our own workforce and thus capabilities, and so on. One strategic path we have chose to follow is to grow by value creation.Our goal is to become one of the top consulting firms, purely measured by our maturity in the services we render, the breadth of our capabilities and superior business value we deliver to our customers from IT and technologies.

While inorganic growth will be an active element of interest for us, it will not define our scale or growth. Towards that, we have established a corporate structure of immense flexibility.

To grow a particular customer’s business needs extremely fine granularity of understanding the customer’s customers. Now if we were to have a customer-facing team that understands this, and then flip over the project to a delivery team, the disconnect is going to create chaos. Our business model has been to establish a team that is responsible both for the customer satisfaction and the bottomline for a particular business. We call it distributed leadership. And Satyam is investing ever more so in this, a talent we believe will propel us forward in the race.

Further, we have an active incubation system that encourages our employees to innovate and build technology platforms that could be consumed by our customers. This initiative is for the long-term growth and will surely bear results in the next few years.

On Ram Mynampati
I have very little to say about myself [laughs]. My role demands interacting with two of our largest stakeholders—customers and investors. I still remain deeply interested in technology, though I am not involved in it on a daily basis. But, yes, an RFID still excites me, as does the implications of an open source world.

I believe our people have two needs when they come to work for us—a forum to communicate and share their ideas, and a flexible work culture that can keep them easily challenged. You can’t go very wrong if you do that.