Mastek recasts top deck; to hire more

MUMBAI: The Rs 700 crore mid-size IT firm Mastek has undertaken a restructuring exercise that will streamline its operations and consolidate key functions under a new management structure. The restructuring is part of the review undertaken by the board, which comprises four directors apart from the founders, Sudhakar Ram, Ashank Desai, R Sundar and Ketan Mehta. In mid-January Ashank Desai, who had played a key role in the company since its inception, had stepped down from his executive role as CMD, and his responsibilities were taken over by Mr Sudhakar Ram.

Under the new structure that has been created, the technology cell and solutions strategy group (which handles multi-million dollar projects like the National Health Service in UK) will report to a chief capability officer (CCO), who will also have responsibility for human resources, training and development, and recruitment. The CCO will be responsible for creating new service lines, in addition to functions such as pre-sales, design and shaping of solutions.

“The restructuring is part of the road map to becoming a 10,000-strong people company from our current strength of 3,500. The exercise was started in January this year and since then, we have been working on it in an iterative manner,” the CMD Sudhakar Ram told ET.

The finance function, being handled by the CFO, will report to a group CFO and finance director, who in addition to handling the finance and investor relations, will also look into functions like planning, facilities, purchase and corporate risk and contract management. “We have a large percentage of fixed price projects, and the role of the finance director will be to ensure that we are signing a contract, we are adequately protected. It involves a legal and commercial aspect,” Mr Ram said.

R Desikan, who was earlier CFO and board member of Xerox India, has been recruited for this position while Dinesh Maheshwary, a former senior management executive at Hewlett Packard, has joined as CCO. Mastek, set up around the same time as Infosys Technologies, has seen several ups and downs in its lifetime. It started off in the products space that really didn’t take off as expected and it was severely hit by the Asian crisis in the late 1990s. In recent years, it has been trying to strengthen its US operations and in the quarter ended March ’07 its North America revenues have grown by 27% over the previous quarter as compared to total revenues that grew 2% sequentially.

The delivery functions comprising six heads of delivery, two for each geography for insurance and non-insurance business, will report to a single head of delivery operations. P Rajagopal Tampi has joined the company in this position. He was earlier V-P and head of solution sales and operations at Mphasis EDS. All the three CXOs will report to a group president and COO who will directly report to Mr Ram.