Vinculum Director corrects reports
By Pulkit Sharma

Regular readers of Techgoss are well aware that a large number of our articles are crowd sourced.  People send in tips, story ideas and even articles. Many of our contributors have full times jobs in IT-ITES, and so prefer using a pseudonym. On Sept 20, 2010, Techgoss had published an article alleging few sloppy salaries and some employee unhappiness at Noida-based Vinculum.

Vinculum’s Director, Strategic Relationships, Venkat has written in giving their side of the story and it seems there are substantial facts to back up his case

“
Your write up on Vinculum is disappointing.  Journalism should not be sensationalism oriented alone. You need to actually find out what is the truth before indulging in irresponsible articles. 

My comments on the points raised by your article are given below:

Yes, we did face cash flow related issues when the market went down in 2009.  There are many companies which went out of business last year and the whole business world went through turmoil.  The bigger companies in this situation have reserves to play with.  We did not.  We had offers from VCs which were delayed. Even household names like Lehman went down...So it is not a new story. But we had the guts to fight on... We did not lay off people for a long time due to our clear views on social responsibility. However, we did take several measures to cut down costs. 

We closed down a SAS practice due to lack of revenue in the practice and there were other people who left the company for better opportunities.  There is nothing abnormal about these things.   

Why don’t you report that we lost just one employee in the first 2 years of operation 2007-08 and 08-09?

We had no salary increases for 18 months prior to April 2010.  Subsequently we have given increments to the team on par with the market.

All employees took a 5% salary cut in 2009-10 and the promoters took a 50% salary cut during this period  

We cut down our costs of operations in year 3 by over 30%.  We turned around a startup firm from a loss making company to a profitable company this year.  We work with over 25 large customers in the region and have won deals against most of the companies in the market including  Accenture, TCS, Wipro, HCL, Zensar, Cognizant etc. Why? There has to be something we are doing right. 

Our salaries are pegged against the market.   They are neither high nor low. Delays have happened and it is not something we have hidden. But, it is a thing of the past.  Most of the senior people have stayed put inspite of 40-50% increase in salaries in the market.  They will obviously earn more outside. Why? It is because they have seen good times in Vinculum, know our intent and they are aware that good times are back and are working hard to grow the company.  

Problem is you have to actually have guts to create successful companies in any situation and especially when the market tanks down.   If you dig deep, you will realize  there are 4-5 individuals who tried anti company activities by trying to go to customers direct against whom we took stern action.  They started writing nonsense comments in jobvent to get back at us.  We have sent legal notices to the individuals involved.  

If you leave aside the 4-5 cheats, there is not a single employee who has not gained professionally in terms of career growth or who is not being paid his dues. Not one. Spend time to speak to some of the people putting their heart and soul in the company.   You will know the real Vinculum. No matter the yellow journalists, or the tricksters who cheated the company, we will emerge stronger and we will succeed.  

I have been living in Hong Kong for the last 10 years and moved overseas 12 years back.  So what is new about me living overseas. Two of the founders are based in Delhi and continue to be. I spend one third of my time in India and the rest overseas since I drive the business development efforts. I wish there was a magic CIO working in the 25 odd customers we do business with and the 50+ customers we expect to do business this year.  But this does not happen in real life.  Information on expenses not paid for overseas trips is just humbug.  No truth whatsoever.  I can continue answering each of the false allegations.  However, you may want to ask yourself why some of the SP Jain Grads ( 5 were recruited last year and some of them continue to work for us) are joining us back from next month.
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