Learning on greens

ICE PEOPLE/ Sumeet Sabharwal

Sumeet Sabharwal

Sumeet Sabharwal hopes to overcome his handicap in golf soon. "It seems like a distant goal, for now," he rues. Besides honing on his teeing skills, the executive hops between Boston and India, managing India operations for NaviSite, an IT management and consulting company.

Sabharwal describes himself as a "focused individual who takes the development of the business extremely seriously, setting exacting standards for both myself and the team." But the flip side "� "I often overlook the individual personalities and drivers that around the table," he confesses.

When he began his career with Motorola as a software engineer, he realised he was not a 9 to 5 guy. "Things came together for me in an entrepreneurial setting at an early stage, and I launched my own IT services company early in 1996," says this go-getter.

Sabharwal's company managed to leap to a 100-people strong in two years, before the infamous dot-com bust took its toll. He calls this entrepreneurial-run as "a real-time accelerated MBA."

He recalls, "NaviSite happened to me through a chance meeting with its CEO, Arthur Becker in New York. He was keen on realising the offshore potential around infrastructure management and application outsourcing services for NaviSite." For Sabharwal, the opportunity was two-fold "� be part of a growing public company in the US and work with a very smart and dynamic leadership team.

NaviSite, a company unknown to Indians, forked out its own set of problems. "The lack of a local brand in the Indian market was the biggest hurdle," he says. NaviSite focuses on the mid-market in the US, a market that is over $400 billion in size and growing at seven per cent annually. "...most of our customers are not big brand names that can be easily recognised within India," points Sabharwal.

NaviSite, today, employs over 100 people in India, which support 900 international customers. The country head of NaviSite announces, "India constitutes of 20 per cent of NaviSite's total workforce and this number continues to grow."