Hot Seat

The turnaround man

Balaji Jagannathan, Country Director, India and Subcontinent for Sybase, tells Rishiraj Verma why it is necessary to sell an idea and not just a product.

Balaji Jagannathan, Country Director, India and Subcontinent, Sybase, comes from a typical middle-class family. His father was in the defence services and this resulted in his cosmopolitan upbringing because his father was always getting transferred.

Jagannathan studied in various schools throughout the country. “I studied in convents and Kendriya Vidyalaya schools all over India,” he says.

He went on to become a Commerce graduate from the Pune University in 1991. Along with this, he also pursued a three-year diploma in software development from the Aptech Institute in Pune. “It was three years of some good coding,” he remembers.

Technology had always excited him. “So I got into the University of British Columbia for a BTech course,” he says, adding that he couldn’t complete the course because he had started working during the same time.

So, if technology fascinated him that much, why didn’t he get into a software development course? He answers, “I always knew that I couldn’t sit on front of a computer and rack my brains over software.”

The journey begins

Jagannathan’s first job dealt with hardware selling for Zenith Computers where he worked from 1991 to 1993. He moved on from being a sales executive to an Account Manager. “With the team there, we managed to get more non-traditional accounts for the company,” he says.

He points out that during this time, the field was changing and he decided to move from the hardware to the software side of technology. “It was a complete paradigm shift,” he says as he talks about his three-year stint at Business Objects. He adds that he had started off with a very small team in Pune, slowly moving to a larger one in Mumbai and finally, he held the national profile.

“Rohini Mittal, the CEO of SAS (earlier known as SAS Institute) offered me to join her company and I took it up,” he says. Jagannathan feels that in his next three years as a Business Manager at SAS, he was exposed to what he calls a truly multinational work culture.

After all this experience, he thought of going in for a bigger portfolio. So he moved on to SGI Silicon Graphics. “This was where I saw what real high-end computing was all about,” he says excitedly. He soon became the Country Head and worked with the company for about three years.

Then again, his mind tilted towards the hardware world and he joined Computer Associates (CA). He worked there as the National Manager for CA’s Information Management products for about two years and a half.

“I then started looking for a portfolio that would allow me to turn around projects that were not doing as good as they could be,” he says. He is of the view that when he joined Sybase after his stint with CA, the company was growing, but only slowly. “The technology there was good, and all that was needed was a simple idea to accelerate the growth and a good team to execute it.”

Talking about his current portfolio as Country Director for Sybase, Jaganathan says, “Here, it’s about integrity, trust and a lot of like-minded people and that’s something I like, a good team.” He talks about the almost 200 percent growth in the last three years and credits it to the management for believing in his team, and the team for being a “phenomenal” support.

The learning curve

After all this experience, Jagannathan says that his biggest achievement has been the learning curve. “I am happy about the fact that today, I can understand my customers’ needs and quickly relate them to what I have to offer.” He says that his job is not one where he makes simple sales. “I make value propositions to customers and try and sell the idea to them, not just a product.”

Dreaming big

Jagannathan comes from, as he says, a typical middle- class family. But his dreams are highly ambitious. He talks about his dreams of turning a badly doing organisation to one that churns high profits. “I want to build a team of people, who are not just hard workers, but also great achievers in the long run.”

About his dreams for the current organisation he works in, he says, “I want to carve a niche for Sybase. In the next two-three years, I want to make it THE big brand.”

On team building

Jaganathan feels that building a good team falls under the ‘basic requirements’ for a good organisation. He says, “When I took up Sybase, there weren’t many people willing to join because of a lot of random market rumours.”

He explains how he spoke to a number of his old colleagues and got them to join his team. “I spoke to an old colleague in South Africa and he left his job there and came to join the Sybase team. At the end of the day, it’s all about trust. You should talk to people who you can trust and who trust you.” According to him, this is the key to building a team that can help turn around the fate of any organisation.

He adds that passion and commitment towards their work are prerequisites for a good team. “You’ve also got to practice what you preach.”

Jagannathan rues that he seems to find practically no time for hobbies of any kind. “I just have one passion apart from my work at this point of time.” He says that he loves speed in all its forms, especially fast cars. “I love driving fast cars, because of the speed, velocity and of course the technology involved,” he concludes.