No more employee rationalisation, selective hiring on: Satyam

Satyam’s Chief People Officer T Hari spoke to ET Now this morning. Here is the full transcript of his interview withthe channel:

First a word on the deal pipeline, a couple of deals have been signed, how is it looking, are you also witnessing the phenomenon that the client pressure is easing, pricing pressure is easing and there could be more deals in the pipeline?

Definitely, I think the message-compared to what we have gone through-is that clearly we are in a position where customer confidence is back. People are not talking about what happened anymore, people are talking about what can happen. So, some of these renewals and extensions are an expression of that confidence and these include potential expansion of our current scope of engagement also. So, it clearly means that we are moving on and we should be looking forward to similar such deals in the future.

What nature of business would these deals be, there are a couple of reports about companies adopting non linear strategies going ahead with regards to even business development for maintaining margins, is that something that is becoming conscious effort at Satyam as well?

That is right, in fact clearly the need is to not look at linear growth and there are pressures when you also increase the number of people. So, the clear direction is - can we provide for service based pricing and whether that could help move us forward? So, clearly Mahindra Satyam is also looking at similar engagement and possibility. I have to also of course say that those are still in the initial stages, there are not too many such deals happening, organisations or some customers, especially in the BPO space, have managed to transition to those models much more aggressively and much more faster but the IT services space is picking up, I would say at a slower pace.

We have heard that Qantas and DuPont are still in the wait and watch mode as far as giving business to Mahindra Satyam is concerned, do you see any positive developments coming out on that front?

I have to definitely say that we do not specifically comment on a given customer, but, I can say that some of the names that you are talking about have been bandied about even earlier. The truth is we continue to engage with most of our customers and have actually enhanced the scope of work in the past few weeks. So I do not think there are such concerns anymore. I would say that those pressures are over.

On employee rationalisation because that has been doing the rounds that because of business pressures, revenue pressures there has been rationalisation of employee levels, do you think that rationalisation is at an end now and in fact we might start to see fresh hiring spree now?

Absolutely, I would say that after we did, the virtual pool programme, we have not had any reason to expand that scope of rationalisation. What we have actually done is recall more than 1000 associates from the virtual pool back to the company in the past 2.5-3 months. I also anticipate that there are going to be select niche skills that we may have to hire. I am starting to see the traction, in fact pressures on me to go ahead and look at the market for a few select skills which we do not have internally. So I do not think there is anymore rationalisation that will be required and I do clearly see the need for additional hiring. Probably in a more enhanced and I would say expanded state by December-January but it will start in a trickle now.

Any update on the legal cases slapped by Caterpillar and Upaid, any updates there for now?

At this stage nothing much that I can add except to say that we are very keen to ensure that there are early settlements to all these programmes. We continue to explore various avenues for the same but at this stage there is no specific update given the state of many of these issues.

There is a report which speaks about a lot of attrition which happened which was voluntary as well as involuntary, now you spoke about there being a possibility of fresh hiring happening, would that essentially be an indication that business is starting to look up in those niche areas or is it essentially to beef up the team for potential future businesses?

Both aspects, one is that clearly the backfilling for some of the voluntary attrition is being done out of the virtual pool programme. So, we are bringing back people wherever possible from within the virtual pool, but, we also notice that there are select areas especially in the enterprise solutions space where we have exhausted what we have in the organisation and also in the virtual pool programme. So that means we are expanding in those specific areas and we would be continuing hire in those areas too.
Can you give us a sense of what kind of numbers we might expect out of the new contract that Mahindra Satyam has bagged right now, just a ballpark number to give an assessment of where revenues are headed?

Let me put it this way. The GE assignment as you know is one of our top 3 customers and clearly about almost 1500 people are engaged in this engagement and many of the customers that we are currently dealing with we are starting to see either a continuity of the same size- that is pre-Jan size- and in some cases we are starting to see expansion beyond that. But, I would not be able to really pin a number and say that broadly our revenue numbers would be towards a given let us say, whatever is the number that you might want to hear, I do not think I will be able to commit on that. Needless to mention that we definitely are in the billion dollar range and that is what we have been saying in the past few months too.