HOW I MOVED MOUNT MICROSOFT – PART IV

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

HOW I MOVED MOUNT MICROSOFT – PART III

 

Mohammad Gawdat !

Our first win with CCF was at Nawras Telecom, a Qatar Telecom subsidiary in the Sultanate of Oman. Microsoft was bidding into this account in competition with Oracle which was promoting its CRM modules. While Oracle was an almost defacto choice at Telcos in the Middle East and had strong domain skills, Microsoft was clearly the underdog at Nawras. MBT brought in the crucial telecom knowledge during the pre sales stage to clinch the deal for Microsoft. This deal was the start of a great relationship with Microsoft Gulf.

It also meant that Oracle, Gulf branded TechM as a foe, a high price to pay to befriend Microsoft, especially in the Middle East. Mohammed Gawdat who used to head the Comm Sector for Microsoft in the MEA region at that time became a dear friend as well as a TechM well wisher. I made some great friends in Aben Kovoor, Mustafa Farhan, Mohammed Maseehuddin, Salim Naim and many more Microsoft staff in the Middle East. It was also the start of a good relationship with Kim Askjaer the IT Director at that time at Nawras Telecom, who had taken a bet on Microsoft CCF against the goliath of the region, Oracle and made it work!!

Kim Askjaer

This win and another one soon at Batelco in Bahrain with CCF got us quite some attention within Microsoft and soon Gawdat and I were talking around the idea of building an O/BSS software stack around the Microsoft technology targeted at Tier 2-3 telecom operators in emerging markets. Gawdat and I saw that the next 3-4 years would see a spate of new telecom licenses in the MEA region and we believed that there was a scope for a lower cost of ownership software stack backed by a leading corporation like Microsoft targeted at telcos. The combination of the brand and technology from Microsoft and the deep domain understanding of Tech Mahindra could make this stack a success, we believed.

Gawdat mobilised the Microsoft end and I did likewise within TechM. We put together a set of partner products (Metratech, Basset, Redknee) that worked on Microsoft technologies and Microsoft’s own offerings in ERP, CRM, BI, Portals and EAI and identified areas that would require some special development of modules by either Microsoft or TechM to complete the stack. The whole idea got into the S0, S1, S2….product lifecycle process that Microsoft Redmond follows thanks to the relentless influencing and persuasion by Gawdat at all levels. We did several conference calls and followed it up with two meetings at Microsoft, Paris at their offices in Le Defense and put together a roadmap for the development of what we initially called as TIAB short for Telco In A Box. Shirish Munj from Tech Mahindra (who subsequently left TechM and eventually became the CIO at Tata Teleservices, Mumbai) was the chief architect of TIAB with his very sharp insights on how it should be structured and built.

Shirish Munj

There was a quite some excitement within the Microsoft team in Redmond and in Europe – Terry McGuigan, Theo Gees, Theirry Fery, Michel Burger, Yves Pitsch, Florian Zink, Jerome Hannebelle, Andrew Steven to get a telco SKU going. Proposals and technical specs flew back and forth thick and fast but what finally went against the initiative was our inability to justify revenues of $ 1 billion over 3 years using the SKU that we were about to invest in and create. As executive sponsors Gawdat and I were targeting to build a low cost of ownership O/BSS stack targeted at smaller telecom operators in the emerging markets who couldn’t afford to pay top dollars but yet would prefer a branded offering. Consequently it was not possible for us to build up the expected revenue forecast that Microsoft senior management wanted, to back the building of a new SKU. At Microsoft in Redmond it was about scale and any product that did not get revenues of around a billion dollars in 3 years did not make the grade.

It was quite unfortunate because we believed that this was the best time for Microsoft to have taken a lead position in the core O/BSS space in the telecom vertical through a market niche that had the potential to be tapped. Oracle had still not done any of its acquisitions – Portal, Siebel, Metasolv and likewise Ericsson had not done its acquisitions too – LHS, Telcordia etc. The only other company that had a complete stack for a telco at that time was Amdocs. The market and the pole position was there to be had at a relatively much lower cost for Microsoft. Sadly, the momentum was lost and Microsoft ended up cobbling together a TBS framework that never really went anywhere.

It was quite disappointing and over time Mohammad Gawdat too moved on from Microsoft to head Google’s MEA business.

 

Don’t go away! More to come………