Prior to Microland, Bekay was with Collabera Inc, a $300 million US IT services firm as their chief strategy officer and CEO of their Indian entity.
Recently, Srinivas R of CIOL met him to discuss Microland's evolution, its future plans and IMS business. Excerpts from the interview (To watch the video of the interview, click here):
CIOL: It's great seeing you back in Microland. Tell us about why did you move out of Microland?
Jawahar Bekay: Sure. Actually, that's an easy one. Microland had built several businesses and one of them was this company called Planet Asia.
So, I had moved from working on various Microland operations to running Planet Asia as a business sometime in 2001-2002 timeframe. As that company continued to grow, we decided to divest that company approximately three and a half to four years ago. During that time we found a company in the US where it made sense to merge Planet Asia into it.
So, in that process, since I was the CEO of Planet Asia, then it was, I guess, partly duty bound for me to go in there and ensure proper integration and transition; and secondly, the goal of the integrated entity was to significantly grow the business, and they wanted me to stay on and run Global Strategy as well as be the CEO the of Indian entity which I did.
At the same time, I never went away from Microland in the classical sense because I was always on the board. So, I had stayed on the board of the company right through and so kept in touch with what changes or what business that they were doing. So, once this got completed, I guess, it was kind of a good time to look back and say, "Look, what's happening here".
CIOL: During early 2000, Microland was one of the top 10 IT companies…and later on, Microland's visibility had come down. So, what went wrong in between…?
JB: Well, I won't necessarily phrase it that way as something went wrong; but if you go back to some of the chronology and if you look at some of the events that happened, it is quite interesting to reflect on that, maybe to see it in a different context.
So, you are right, in the system integration era, we were the market leaders, we brought in the networking as a phrase itself and as a concept into India, the first of several networks were built by us all over the country, whether it was banks, erstwhile Internet providers, and so on and so forth.
You went out and you bought hardware and along with hardware you got a whole bunch of services free, pretty much. So, it was done free as long as the hardware was supplied. And so we had to play to that tune in that sense, and that's why we were system integrators per se saying we will bring the best-of-the-breed technologies and through us, therefore, all the big names of the day, whether it was Cisco, Synoptics, Compaq, and many other such companies came in and we provided that to the end customer.
Then, over time, we realized that this market is going to get commoditized. Just like world over, as markets mature, hardware becomes commoditized; and somewhere along the way, we took a decision saying, "We don't want to play in that commoditized market space" though we were growing very well. We took, I think, a bold decision at that time to get away completely from supply of hardware and concentrate only on services.
So, that was a huge shift per se. Everything changes, right? Your cash flows change, the way you deal with business changes, and that took some time for us to put into play; and in the meanwhile, the Internet market started emerging and for us actually we see the Internet era as quite a successful period because of the launch of I think four or five really big brands at that time, whether it is Indya.com, Planet Asia, IT Space, and all of whom were successfully launched, executed at that time, brought in huge amounts of business in their own way.
And ultimately I think when we saw that there was this collapse happening around the Internet and that there was some questions around the viability of that whole economy at that time, we were able to go and in many of these cases put these companies into safe hands by selling them back. In the case of Indya, we sold it to Murdoch; in the case of Planet Asia, we have merged; IT space into what is today also a very successful group company of Euro RSCG where it resides right now.
So, I think that was a phase where we went through and did all of that and then moved to…I think around 2002-2003 is really what we called "third wave of outsourcing" if you look at it…and the third wave of outsourcing was I think built upon the fact that lot of things had changed in India by then.
