Interview with Sanjaya Sharma, CEO, Tata Interactive Systems

Sanjaya Sharma, CEO of Tata Interactive Systems, recently spoke to CIOL. Some excerpts from that interview:

On merging with TCS:
[Sanjaya] There is no immediate talk of such a move, and I will be very surprised if it happens in 2006.

On facing pricing pressure from other e-learning players in India?
[Sanjaya] It has been so for quite many years. Many small e-learning companies often undercut each other to gain projects. But, TIS has been largely away from all this. The clients that choose us do so for the quality work that we do, in the last few years our average price has appreciated and not gone down. Clients recognize that we stand for quality, we have recently been awarded four international prizes for our work. Clients appreciate the kind of investment we have made in the facility and the overheads. Customers that are anyways looking for lower prices will always find vendors that offer them.

On attrition:
[Sanjaya] As far as people joining competition is concerned, there is also a lot of reverse flow happening. E-learning industry in India is still very fluid, so this kind of to-and-fro movement is pretty commonplace.

On implementing SAP:
[Sanjaya] With the use of SAP, we have aligned all our global offices on a single system. We have over 300 people who are working abroad. We have offices in different continents of America, Europe, Middle East, Asia-Pacific. There are at any given moment close to 200 projects that the company is working on. Keeping in mind all these complexities, the implementation of SAP ERP has helped us no end. Now, all the orders can be logged, tracked at a click of a button.

On its European acquisitions:
[Sanjaya] We acquired Tertia Edusoft AG in Switzerland and Tertia Edusoft GmbH in Germany. These are small companies that focus on specific areas; Like the German company, which was renowned in the country for it Simulation products; Or the Swiss company has a very unique anti money laundering product that has very good potential across the world. We chose these companies for the specific skill sets that they provided. These were profitable firms working in a niche market, now they are part of a global company. It has also helped us increase our footprints in European markets.

On the future:
[Sanjaya] We are quite buoyant about the future prospects. TIS is a 16-year-old company, and has created a brand name that is known globally. We will be opening an office in South Africa shortly. We are aiming for over 30 per cent growth this year. It is quite an exciting time to be in business.

Link to full interview.

Comments

[A Sify ID]

Well Shanvi, you posted this on August 6th. Let's see, its been three months. Now the way you have described the situation, it seems that you have quite a few sources inside Satyam and Sify. If you get a chance to check with them you might be surprised to know that many of the people who left Sify are yearning to come back. You might also hear of a massive rebuff that Satyam had to face from one of the "key" client who chose Sify over Satyam. Not even a single account has left Sify's hands, in fact all the accounts are ramping up. And the latest buzz is that Satyam's so called elearning foray has been dubbed illtimed by the very people who joined there. How do you explain feelers by the very resources that left us and want to come back now? :-)

[Shanvi]

At one side of the indian elearning industry we are having mergers and acquisitions happening with each company working towards increasing the market share in this industry, while on the other side of the same world we have companies like Satyam and Sify which were once allies (sify was 100% subsidiary of Satyam untill all the investments were divested by Satyam to save itself from its investors) now fighting with each other. The issue is so bad that Sify resources are moving out everyday and all senior resources have already left Sify.The new management taking over and whole lot of other issues like bad treatment by the delivery head and has led to additional spat of its resources and heavy attrition is on at Sify now. This has also worked in Satyam's favour with most of the associates joining satyam as they enter full fledged into the elearning space now.

It will be interesting to see lot more of this in the next few weeks as few critical accounts change hands from Sify to satyam. Sify's 75% revenue for their elearning business is from Satyam directly....... Lets all wait and watch!!!!