More top hires at Mahindra Satyam

Bobby Gupta to head Mahindra Satyam's Australia, NZ operations

Soon after it hired Manoj Chugh, the former president (Asia-Pacific, Japan) of storage solutions provider EMC as its global head for business development, information technology services company Mahindra Satyam has front-end team.

The company said it had appointed G B Kumar, an industry veteran who worked in various leadership roles at Cisco and Intel, as head of its Middle East and North Africa (MENA) business.

In his previous role, Kumar, who replaces Gupta in MENA, has led Asia-Pacific, Japan and China as managing director of enterprise services for Cisco Systems.

Bobby Gupta, earlier heading its MENA business, has now been tasked with building on one of the largest English-speaking market – Australia, New Zealand (ANZ).

The announcement of the new leadership team is aligned with the company’s recently-declared concept 'The CEO Force', a framework to foster distributed leadership, and is part of its intent to pursue rapid growth in ANZ and the West Asian markets.

According to analysts, Mahindra Satyam, soon expected to merge with parent Tech Mahindra, is slowly positioning itself as an aggressive player in the global markets. It has also set a goal of becoming a $5 billion revenue company by 2015. The hiring of senior professionals who have wide experience in working with global technology companies is seen as important steps towards this direction. “Mahindra Satyam has clearly moved on from its past trauma and is aggressively focusing on growth,” said Sudin Apte, CEO & Research Director of Offshore Insights, an offshore advisory firm.

Mahindra Satyam garners 24 per cent of its revenues from the RoW (rest of the world) market, which comprises geographies like Australia, New Zealand, West Asia and other geographies in Asia and Africa. With good traction seen in BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance), manufacturing, airlines and government, the company aims to grow rapidly with the new leadership change.

“Both ANZ and MEA markets are high-growth opportunities for Mahindra Satyam, after we complete our merger with Tech Mahindra. We sense traction from clients, prospects and partners that gives us a great reason to lend more focus here,” said Rohit Gandhi, senior vice-president (Asia-Pacific, India, West Asia and Africa), Mahindra Satyam.

The merger between Tech Mahindra and Mahindra Satyam is expected to start after obtaining necessary approval from the Andhra Pradesh High Court. The company, is expecting to close it at the earliest.