WE ARE BUILDING DEEPER RELATIONSHIPS WITH OUR EXISTING CUSTOMERS

Bibhu Ranjan Mishra, Mumbai, March 09, 2009
Business Standard

MphasiS, the IT and business process outsourcing service provider, has seen some changes in recent years. First, the Bangalore-based company promoted by Jerry Rao was acquired by EDS. Then, HP acquired EDS last year. Despite uncertainties in IT outsourcing, MphasiS, which has now aligned its financial year with HP's accounting year (November to October), has shown satisfactory results. Ganesh Ayyar, its new CEO, and Sushanto Banerjee, CFO (interim), speak on the growth strategy.

Excerpts:

How many MphasiS employees have been affected following integration of EDS with HP?

Ganesh Ayyar: I can't comment. HP is a very important customer-cum-partner for us and we get 45 percent of our business from them. But we work to earn it.

Will the variable component in the salary be linked to the performance of the employees as well?

Ayyar: Lot of things will be performance-linked — that's true and that's how we exist. But that has nothing to do with the salary base. Everyone in the industry is talking about salary cuts now. At this point, we are not using that option. If the situation really gets that bad, then we will revisit that decision.

Last quarter you added 574 freshers. What is your plan (now) for freshers' recruitment?

Ayyar: We added 575 freshers this quarter. We have started recruitment in this quarter again for freshers. That's an investment we want to make for our future business. That's where our cost optmisation comes in and that's where we can build a competitive cost structure.

There is also talk that many Satyam employees have joined you.

Ayyar: But how much of that has happened? It's more noise than reality. We have a good customer base today and we, of course, are going after new ones. But our first focus is to delight our existing customers; retain them and grow our business with them in this current economic environment. Of course, we are going after other businesses. In that context, if Satyam customers are looking for some other service providers, we don't have any problem.