Satyam is now Mahindra Satyam and Kooldudz scores a century

It's official now. The word Satyam ceases to exist alone in the corporate world from today and has been changed to Mahindra Satyam as they thought Satyam cannot stand on its own and needed the value of Mahindra's. This seems to be a good strategic move made by Mahindra people to retain the name of scam-hit Satyam to brand it as an amalgamation of Satyam's technical expertise and niche and Mahindra's corporate values and thus retaining a part of the Satyam's identity and at the same time deleting the part that contained the part Ramalinga Raju. Now, Satyam employees can be relieved a bit with the addition of the word Mahindra in front of it that Mahindra bosses will take equally good care of Mahindra Satyam as take care of the employees of Tech Mahindra. This also means that Pune-based IT major Tech Mahindra and Hyderabad-based Mahindra Satyam will continue to operate as two separate players in the IT industry where they can both even bid for some projects individually and but cannot bid together for projects that require domain expertise. Satyam's expertise has been well known in SAP and ERP domain while Tech Mahindra has proved its mattle in support systems like OSS and BSS and thus giving them a sharp edge over the other IT majors who will now have to rethink about their strategies to counter these two giants.

This blog is Kooldudz's 100th post on "Cool Dudes Chill Out." It has been a long and continuous journey which has been ably supported by readers not only from India but a reader base that spans 38 countries and thus making "Cool Dudes Chill Out" really a global phenomenon. Thanks to all the readers for sparing their valuable time and reading the posts and thus giving me the strength to go on and score a thousand. Once again, thanks a lot one and all.

© 2009 Ranjan Kumar

Tech Mahindra will not lay off surplus employees

Some relief for the frustrated Satyam employees. In a major announcement made today by Tech Mahindra CEO Vineet Nayyar, they are not going to retrench any of the 10,000 surplus employees but rather would put them in a separate pool where they will be paid Basic salary, PF, and medical insurance, and whenever required they will be put into the regular work pool. This will comfort those employees standing on the edge, but might prove to be a short-term comfort zone only. By announcing this, Tech Mahindra has tried to kill two birds with one stone. One, they have very tactfully avoided any employee grievance issue from creeping up and also avoiding Government of India taking any stern action against them and secondly they have given a time frame for their surplus employees to find them a new job in the market as soon as possible and till the time they are not able to get one, their basic necessities will be taken care of by the company. This in fact seems to be a good practice that should be followed by every companies dealing with surplus employee issues. This way, they can at least give their employees a certain time frame to go out looking for a new job without bothering about their basic monthly expenses. I think we must all welcome this decision by Tech Mahindra and we hope that this practice should be followed by all the companies planning to give pink slips to their employees in this great recession time.

© 2009 Ranjan Kumar