Hot seat

Addicted to challenges

Santanu Paul seeks to be different. The GM (operations) and head of productisation at Virtusa (India) left a cushy job at IBM to found a startup and eventually found his way to the Indian software industry, says Srinivasa Rao Dasari

Santanu Paul was born in Duliajan, an oil town in Assam, and didn’t have any formal education till he was old enough for class four. But his informal education helped him acquire self-learning skills right from childhood. He joined Kendriya Vidyalaya and later Ramakrishna Mission at Narendrapur near Kolkata. The Ramakrishna Mission is known for its discipline and strict moral values. Not surprisingly, Paul is proud of his school. He was among the Top-100 in IIT-JEE, and graduated with sciences from IIT, Chennai. According to him, there was more competition in the computer sciences department as students there were smarter compared to those in other branches of engineering. Later, Paul did his doctorate from Michigan University, US. His research was on software reverse engineering. He had more than 20 papers to his credit by the time the PhD was completed.

From Big Blue to a start-up

Paul’s career began with IBM, which sponsored some of his work during his PhD. Working on next-generation software as an IBM scientist gave him the experience to understand things from the end-user perspective, as well as to plan and develop software projects. He also led a group of scientists in developing next-generation workflow management. Sometime during his stint at IBM of about four years, Paul realised that he was not fit for bigger organisations since his internal urge was for newer and quicker opportunities. “The two things I missed at IBM were flexibility and lack of exposure to business challenges, though I learnt a lot by working with intelligent scientists in IBM’s work environment,” recalls Paul.

The emerging B2B market boom during the late nineties motivated Paul to explore opportunities in e-commerce. In January 1999, he left IBM and launched Viveca along with a friend. The venture started off in a two-bedroom flat in Boston, and the duo successfully developed B2B software for e-commerce. In the early days of the boom, many companies had their own catalogues on websites. It was difficult for customers to browse through details as there were different catalogues in a variety of formats such as Excel, PDF, etc. Viveca’s USP was a single catalogue, the Electronic Supplier Catalogue. Unfortunately, B2B e-commerce crashed in early 2000 along with much else in the dotcom world.

Paul transformed himself from a techie to a business developer. He says, “Floating and running Viveca taught me how to raise money for the organisation, how to run it. Then came the rescue. The CEO of Open Pages bought us out. Open Pages was looking for people in content management, so I became the CTO of the parent company and redesigned all pages and content. I had the opportunity to interact with people who had strong business management skills, and I consider that a major transformation in my career from techie to entrepreneur to business development.”

Paul made up his mind to return to India in December 2002 as a result of an offer from Virtusa, which was also funded by Sigma. In May 2003, Paul left Open Pages and joined Virtusa.

Aspirations

By 2015, he wants to see Virtusa in the list of the greatest companies built in India. “My ambition is to build and create companies, but we can’t build alone…teamwork makes it possible.” He wants to be involved in public service after a corporate career.

Explaining the importance of short-term planning Paul says, “When I finished my PhD I got offers from universities for the post of a professor, but I turned them down as I wanted to be involved in decision-making. I feel happy when I make a good decision. Since I enjoy decision-making, I have opted for a career in the corporate sector which offers this kind of experience. Beyond this, I cannot say anything more about the future. I am not a person who thinks too far ahead. I prefer to plan for only the next three or four years, and at the end of that period evaluate the plan.”

“The biggest hurdle for Indian professionals is their preference for career security. This is very unfortunate. Any top-class professional from Silicon Valley would prefer to work for start-ups as they offer a more challenging environment and job satisfaction,” opines Paul.