Internet is great marketing channel for us

'Internet is great marketing channel for us'

Jawahar Bekay is Microland's chief operating officer responsible for the global operations of Microland's Infrastructure Management businesses.

Monday, June 22, 2009

CIOL: So, now what is your role and what are the changes that you are planning to bring?

JB: Change is inevitable. Change is good, right? My role is really…you know, I am called the chief operating officer. So, I guess to that extent it tells you what the role is in operations. So, I have been brought in to run the global operations of the company as well as, additional to that, to grow the India business. I am also the P&L head for the India business which is why it has extra interest in my focus areas.

And, as a company, I think Microland has done excellent work for its customers in the last…even if you take this wave of IMS business last seven odd years…very high quality work has been done with clients both international and domestic across all of these towers that I just mentioned. So, I think the company has got good capability, both width and depth, across this 2400 people now. And, clearly as we see, more and more growth coming in the IMS space, we see an opportunity now to quickly capitalize on the strong base that has been built and scale the company. So, I think in the next two to three years of the company the focus is going to be on scale and how do we scale it to a larger size, you know, than the 2400…

CIOL: Any target in mind?

JB: Well, we believe we should, you know, be 2-3X our size in quick time.

CIOL: Timeframe?

JB: Well, you know, right now the markets recessionary. So, it may dampen some of our estimates until things improve, but in the normal course, we would have said we could do that in two to three years.

CIOL: Okay. is recession affecting this particular area?

JB: Well, I think decision making cycles have slowed down a bit, but I think we are seeing less of a pressure here than we are seeing, say, on the software side… Not that we play in it, but we are just looking at some of our other industry colleagues…but we expect it to be, you know, cautious at least for 12-18 months till things improve. But, you know, this is an annuity business. So, all our contracts that we have continue to kind of exist, and within our contracts there is a lot of opportunity itself for growth because as we do work…these are large enterprises…you get to take on more and more of the work because it is benefiting them, it is reducing their cost of operations at the end of the day. So, thanks to all of that, we…you know, our hope is that we will continue to grow.

CIOL: Any other emerging areas that you are looking at?

JB: We are not looking at anything outside of IMS.

CIOL: Is Microland planning to go for IPO?

JB: Well, I am sure we would. You know, right now it's not a good time anyway, all things considered; but certainly, it is one of our plans in the medium term, definitely.

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