From mechanical engineering to heading the IT function

Ved Prakash Nirbhya, CIO, Tech Mahindra, has seen it all from working on projects abroad for diverse clients to running the software player’s IT and setting up value chains. By Prashant L. Rao

Ved Prakash Nirbhya

Ved Prakash Nirbhya completed his Masters degree in Marketing and Systems from IMT Ghaziabad. He was an ITI graduate engineer trainee for about 14 months and after that he decided to move back to his hometown and got a post at BEL Ghaziabad. “I got posted into the IT department and spent the next eight years in BEL where I gained experience in working with technology ranging from flat file systems to RDBMS,” said Nirbhya, CIO, Tech Mahindra.

In the mid 1990s, he moved to Tech Mahindra. The company’s IT division was growing and in 1994, Nirbhya joined up and became the Project Manager handling an ERP implementation for one of the Mahindra Group companies. After a year or so, he went to the UK as the Customer Delivery Manager for one of the company’s key customers, British Telecom, and spend 2.5 years in that role. It was a front-end role interfacing with the telco and he gained a good idea of how a telco runs its IT set-up during this stint. After this, Nirbhya returned to India and began to manage multiple programs for BT from India. Over time, he delivered major programming work in the Operations Support System (OSS) area and some Business Support System (BSS) programs as well. More recently he shifted into the CIO function at Tech Mahindra, which is where he is today.

As the IT head of this software services major, Nirbhya has been responsible for setting up eight value chains that go right from when a customer places an order to the point where Tech Mahindra gets the money. He’s taken care of the automation as well as the efficient running of all eight value chains.

Upcoming technology

“Cloud computing is interesting and it has been growing for the last few years,” said Nirbhya. His take on the Cloud was that it was all about delivering hosted services over the Net. “There are various delivery mechanisms—IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. It gives companies access to a shared IT platform that is available 24x7 that would otherwise cost them a lot of money to deploy. The business model works well. You can increase or decrease usage as per your needs,” he commented. Nirbhya expected that more people would be adopting this model.

With regard to deduplication, he said, “It offers benefits with respect to storage utilization. However, I don’t see companies utilizing this technology for primary storage. On the other hand, it would be quite useful for backup/archival. For a segment like Retail where the data volumes are huge and you have to store this data for many years, deduplication would be very useful.”

When it came to virtualization/consolidation, Nirbhya stated, “Some of our customers are going for it. It lets them reduce the number of data centers that they have to operate. It also improves the utilization of the compute infrastructure. It is here to stay. We are looking at it ourselves. Server virtualization should help us move to a more standardized environment,” he added.

IT@Tech Mahindra

“We are running PeopleSoft 9 as our main ERP solution along with a few home grown applications to cover some IT industry-specific processes. The ERP system is running on production grade Sun boxes in a cluster and using the Sun SAN storage solution to host the Oracle 10G database. The homegrown applications are on the .NET platform and use SharePoint Portal as a collaboration platform. We also use Oracle CRM on demand (Siebel) which is a hosted CRM solution,” commented Nirbhya.

Challenges faced

When asked to talk about a major challenge that he had encountered in his career, he related the tale of an ERP upgrade that proved so challenging that the company actually considered a redeployment. Another challenge that he has encountered of late is how to make better use of knowledge assets. Today, employees at Tech Mahindra, like their peers elsewhere, use Social Networking Sites (SNS) extensively to facilitate their work. “We have started using SNS for major bids as the team working on these is scattered across multiple locations,” said Nirbhya.

The company has operations in over 25 countries with 35,200 professionals scattered across 17 sales offices and 13 delivery centers.

“Our ultimate goal is to extend this to the day-to-day lives of our employees. For a company like ours with multiple locations and customer sites, this technology makes a lot of sense,” he added.

IT plans for the next 6-12 months

“During the last few years, the focus of CIOs in our industry was primarily around cost and productivity improvements. Our priority is our CIO 2.0 initiative, which is about focusing on business agility and customer experience rather than focusing solely on cost and productivity improvements. We want to deploy those solutions that improve the customer experience by adding collaboration platforms, using Web 2.0, to their daily work especially to make better use of knowledge assets which is fundamental to our business. We are going to enhance our BI capabilities to focus on 'Just in time MIS' as business users can't wait for days to take decisions,” said Nirbhya.

He added, “At the same time, we are going to use a virtualization solution for better and efficient use of our IT investments and look to use cloud computing solutions where possible without impacting the security and regulatory requirements of the business.”

Team building

Regarding grooming the next generation of tech leaders, he had this to say. “We in IT are lucky to work with a large numbers of young and bright people who are always looking to challenge the conventional methods of working. We need to acknowledge and encourage such behavior in the team and give them space and opportunities to learn new ways of doing things. I have been pleasantly surprised with the results. One shoe does not fit all while dealing with individuals but communication and timely feedback about performance is the key to keeping them motivated.” Nirbhya has been following a collective leadership approach in his day-to-day work and he has found it to be the best way to mentor his teams and develop the next rung of leadership.

State of the economy

With regard to the Indian market, he felt that the trend was positive. However, for the IT industry, the health of the US and European economies was vital and on that front, although the US appeared to be recovering, Europe was still mired in the recession. “There are positive signs, however, as many of our European customers are coming forward and deals are happening. Overall, the next six to twelve months should be positive,” he concluded.

prashant.rao@expressindia.com