RISING TIDE

Can a rising tide really raise all boats? Satyam Chairman B. Ramalinga Raju addressed the crowd at TeleManagement World last week and said, yes, it could — and should. Using the success of his consulting and IT service business as an example, Raju tried to correct some misconceptions about offshore outsourcing and appealed to the crowd's sense of both business and humanity. According to Alpna Doshi, vice president of telecom business for Satyam, Raju threw out the script his team had prepared for him and just spoke from the heart.

Not a technologist by nature, Raju is more of an international businessman with a soft spot, understandably, for developing countries. The Ohio State grad incorporated Satyam Computer Services in 1987 and took it public in 1992. He's got a $1 billion run rate now and employs more than 20,000 people in 46 countries. When not playing snooker, he considers how innovation, or as he says, invention, is behind most wealth creation and how important it is to spread that wealth around the world.

And he doesn't mean that it should be spread around in the ultra-liberal, or even socialist, ideals of community wealth. He thinks technology, particularly networking technology, provides opportunity to tap talent pools worldwide that allow people to create their own wealth.

Satyam was the first company in India to install a 64 kb/s circuit from the U.S. and was a pioneer in outsourced development services. Now Raju wants to use today's broadband to bring opportunity to India's smaller, more remote area, to Africa and other developing countries. “It's a new way of engaging the rest of the world,” he said.

He also said that network technology combined with business models such as his, which “virtualize” consulting, integration and development, work by turning every issue into a platform problem that can be broken into processes, 80% of which he says can be done virtually — a euphemism, if you will, for outsourcing.

Raju's argument that virtualizing work, as he has done, can incorporate 4 billion people into the global market who otherwise would be left out of it is hard to deny. He said telecom could lead us to a different world.

So let's continue to lead, but while we're at it, let's bring back some of those manufacturing jobs to ensure a balanced future where as dinghies rise, the ocean liners don't sink to the bottom.

And let's understand that telecom can't do it all by itself. Last year, a study by Deloitte Research said about 275,000 jobs, or 5% of the telecommunications work force, will be done offshore by 2008. The moves will cut costs by 30% and save the industry $14 billion per year. That's pretty good for starters. Now let's fill the bilge pumps.