All the wins with telcos in MEA region as well as the engagements around TIAB made the MEA region a successful crucible for the MS – TechM relationship. As also the head of sales for MEA, I was in a position to drive many of the partner relationships successfully on ground but it was now time to take things global with Microsoft. One of the best things that happened was the movement of Nikhil Balagopalan from TechM’s Middle East unit to Redmond to become the Microsoft Account Manager on ground.
Nikhil, a high energy and extroverted software developer had approached me over a year ago to consider him for a sales role. I had promptly deployed him into our Dubai office where amongst other things he was the primary point of contact for the Microsoft relationship in the MEA region. He did several high profile Go to Market engagements with Microsoft across the region and it was only natural that he was picked up by our President CP Gurnani (he has since become the Managing Director of the combined Tech Mahindra and Mahindra Satyam) to be deputed to Redmond. All of a sudden the activity levels and engagements shot up at the Redmond end.
Nikhil Balagopalan (He joined Microsoft & is now based in Redmond)
With Nikhil on the ground, I promptly started the initiative of offering our staff, deployed at MS-IDC, Hyderabad the opportunity of working at Redmond. This also meant convincing Microsoft managers at IDC to let go of their key temps for this roll over to Redmond. We agreed on release plans and timelines and soon it became possible for Nikhil to offer Microsoft experienced resources at Redmond. I won’t say that this strategy was an unqualified success but it did help to break ice at Redmond and we did make a few deployments that later lead to more work of different kinds. This move also helped attract more people from within TechM to take up the Microsoft assignment at Hyderabad in the hope that they too would get a chance to go to Redmond.
It was during Nikhil’s tenure that our sell through engagements began to grow global beyond just the Middle East. Nikhil set up a furious tempo through regular conference calls with India and arranged to get TechM visibility into the other regions at Microsoft. Soon we were engaged on many more CCF sales in Europe, India and APAC. Strangely we were not able to break into the American sales unit of Microsoft. Again the telco-only specialization made it difficult to catch the attention of the US sales team with just CCF as the primary go to market offering. Besides, in the US the Microsoft sales team had an existing deep relationship with Accenture for CCF and it was difficult to break this.
In the meantime we started to get some product development work from Redmond. One was around the CCF Portal and the other was a project code named “Marianas” that sought to build a reporting solution for Telcos on top of the Microsoft SQL server using BI tools. This was to eventually become the seed around which Microsoft would build a BI solution for telcos. The uptake of this solution with telcos, especially the smaller ones, was very good and Microsoft Consulting jumped in to own the go to market for this solution that TechM helped build.
Microsoft had also launched its next big initiative called the Connected Services Framework (CSF) targeted at telcos and TechM was involved in some deployments across the world including at British Telecom. TechM also was an early partner in the CSF Sandbox initiative that sought to create a shared development environment for building apps in an almost open forum.
Around this time two very senior and talented individuals from TechM were drafted into Microsoft at Redmond to be part of some key programs. One was Sunil Aggarwal and the other was Satyabhushan Mahapatra (SB).
With active support from SB and Sunil, Nikhil drove a slew of initiatives with Microsoft where TechM was actively involved as a co–creator as well as a potential future implementer.
- EVS (Enhanced VOIP Services) a combination of VoIP and Instant Messaging services in a hosted environment.
- HMC (Hosted Messaging Collaboration) a suite of Microsoft which is a combination of Exchange and SharePoint offered to Hosting and Internet service providers.
- HSSP (Hosted Self Service Portal) a portal that enables provisioning, administration and self care of HMC and EVS for hosters, resellers, customers and users.
On its part, Tech Mahindra too made substantial investments into MS-TV and trained a bunch of people in the technology. We signed the MSA with MGSI in India and were actively involved in the MS-TV implementations that were going on offshore at Hyderabad.
In 2007, Microsoft became one of the top five global accounts for Tech Mahindra, alongside BT and AT&T.
I had started to move Mount Microsoft!!
PS : There are so many names that I have not mentioned in these posts. I could not weave them in, else the posts would have got so long. Let me try and mention some more names here. Sandeep Athavale – the quiet worker without whom I would have failed in making Microsoft happen. Kumar Anand – the high energy go getter and an ex Microsoft staffer himself. He was the brains behind the Marianas success and also the CSF work we did at BT. Trusha Chittal and L. Manivannan who worked as pre sales consultants within Microsoft and helped sell TechM to their respective MS sales teams constantly. Maghesh B.M who stepped in when Nikhil moved to Redmond and in his own quiet and assured way built deep relations at Microsoft. And a whole bunch of people across TechM in sales, delivery, training, hiring, hospitality, support……
Kumar Anand
Sandeep Athavale
MEAxpert 