Chaudhary's odyssey

ICE PEOPLE

Geeta Chaudhary

What is someone who studied child development and launched and sold a dotcom company doing in a telecom multinational?

The woman in question: Geeta Chaudhary, vice president (sales operations and marketing) at Lucent Technologies Hindustan, the Indian arm of US-based telecom equipment company Lucent Technologies.

Chaudhary acquired a masters degree in child development at Punjab University, joined Shri Ram School in Delhi and would perhaps have ended her career as a school teacher had she not headed for Harvard to study further in the field of education.

"It was there that I realised that I wanted to be on the business side of things. Therefore, I switched tracks and decided to do an MBA from Boston University. I specialised in both marketing and finance," Chaudhary says.

It was while doing her MBA that she first came into contact with AT&T as a summer intern. That was the beginning of a long relationship.

Her first stop after completing her MBA was "� you guessed it "�AT&T which she joined as an assistant manager. "AT&T was the biggest telecom company in the world. I got wide exposure and helped launch its internet service, Worldnet," Chaudhary says.

The next stop was Mumbai, to which her husband moved as country head of Alltel. Instead of sitting at home, Chaudhary launched dotcom company Webequity which ran the auction portal Khulja Sim Sim.

Subsequently, four other websites came into the Webquity fold through a merger "� Cafe Mumbai, Cafe Delhi, Cafe Calcutta and Cafe Bangalore. Ever the realist, Chaudhary realised that it would take five to seven years for Webquity to break even. She quit while ahead by selling her stake to ICICI Ventures.

That was when she realised that the telecom industry presented a great opportunity. "I had experience in operations as well as marketing, which not many people had in India then. I decided to capitalise on that and joined Reliance Infocomm as vice president (marketing). I learnt a lot there but decided to quit for family reasons," says Chaudhary.

The next stop? Lucent Technologies, which had been spun off some years ago from AT&T.

In her spare time Geeta travels, swims and plays golf (her handicap: under 20). Her travels have taken her to Hong Kong, China, Australia, Malaysia and Thailand.

What next? "I want to continue playing a leadership role," she says. For a golfer, that is par for the course.