How Indian rivals targeted Satyam
By Onlooker

For 10 years, Satyam founder Ramalinga Raju was one of the golden men of the Indian IT-ITES sector. Raju was feted by politicians and big business.  He was awarded the Golden Peacock Award for Corporate Governance in 2008 as well as the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year in 2007.  By now, it is history that Satyam was a house of cards build by con man Raju and his family.

Techgoss was one of the few news sites regularly running stories about all that was rotten inside Satyam.  On Dec 24, 2008, Techgoss had published a story titled ‘Satyam bosses to exit’ which predicted the Board would dump Mr. Raju and his coterie by Dec 29, 2008. 

Mr. Raju did quit but only a few days later on Jan 7, 2009.  He admitted to inflating Satyam’s cash reserves by more than 1.5 Billion dollars.  Currently, the disgraced founder in languishing in jail.  Forensic experts are still working out how many hundreds of millions have been stashed away.

The Indian Government stepped in to save a tech icon and avoid collateral damage to the credibility of our booming IT-ITES sector.  In a well organized and executed plan, Satyam was steadied and sold to Tech Mahindra.

Now that the dust has settled, the true story of what happened is slowly emerging. It is said that while the world was just hearing the first news items of Chairman Ramalinga Raju’s resignation on Jan 7, 2009, the tech industry was getting their armour ready for the attack on their stricken colleague Satyam.

According to industry insider, hours after the revelation by Raju, all the rival companies scrambled in-house meetings and handed their best sales men a list of top 120 clients of Satyam. Their new task was to create the best business proposals for Satyam’s clients and sign them up ASAP.  Satyam’s loss was their gain.

Barring Infosys, all the companies started surrounding Satyam’s nervous clients like hungry honeybees. In this race, TCS grabbed the highest number of deals. The TCS wins amounted to more than 100 million dollars. Even Wipro tried pulling in a few clients, but the recent news from World Bank banning the company, came as a big blow.

Infosys (as ordered by its founder Mr. Murthy) was the only one to stay on the sidelines. In a meeting with Infosys senior officials, Mr. Murthy told his executives to respect the company’s inner strength and competitive value. According to him, Infosys would participate only in a public bid and would clinch exiting Satyam clients through a formal bidding process.

As previously reported by Economic Times, Satyam lost 46 clients to tech rivals such as Wipro, Accenture, IBM and Tata. Those clients leaving Satyam include Emerson, State Farm Insurance and Australian Telco Telstra. A few examples were 3i Infotech that got Abu Dhabi Bank; Capgemini which signed a $100 million deal with Coca-Cola and Cognizant which bagged GlaxoSmithKline.

Moreover, a similar list was prepared for the top performing executives working at Satyam. But this time it was the rival technology companies HR Departments that were tasked with head hunting key Satyam personnel as their world came crashing down. However, out of the 250 names in the list, only a handful of the employees left their jobs, while the other stayed back at Satyam.

Despite this, in the month of April, the Chief Executive Officer of Tech Mahindra claimed to have won back most the clients.