Satyam is second chance for Phaneesh, Banerjee

Sukumar Ranganathan — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 10:43:00 GMT

Satyam's new CEO and CFO, although they might not be designated that, are to be announced ~~this evening at 6.30~~ soon.
This post isn't about them.
It is about two men who have some chance of overseeing Satyam's future as and when the company is sold -- either to L&T, which currently has around 12% stake in the company or some other interested bidder. The first of this men is Sudip Banerjee, a long-time Wipro hand who eventually left the company because he wasn't made CEO or even joint CEO of the company's software business and was sent off to be part of Azim Premji Invests, the investment company that manages the wealth of Wipro Chairman Azim Premji.
This blogger has met Banerjee once, in the early 2000s, soon after Wipro moved to its new campus in Bangalore's Electronics City, close to Infosys' campus.
He struck me as hard working, ambitious, and very very proud of his company and what he did for it. He spent a little over two hours walking me through the new campus and showing how Wipro had managed to create a great looking workplace "without spending too much money."
He would have probably been as good or as bad a CEO of Wipro's technology business as anybody else, especially in these trying times when no amount of leadership of smart management can make up for the fact that there is simply not much business to be had.
That wasn't to be and he now heads L&T's IT business. If L&T gets control of Satyam, chances are, it may turn to him to head the company.
The second person is Phaneesh Murthy, whom I've never met.
Murthy, a former Infosys employee (and senior and popular enough to be called the other Murthy at Infosys; the first is the company's co-founder and non-executive chairman N R Narayana Murthy) left the company after a sexual harassment suit by a former employee in the US.
He left promising to build another software giant. At Infosys, he was a legend of sorts because he signed a lucrative outsourcing contract with Nordstorm, a retail chain, a few months after Infosys refused to be arm-twisted by General Electric Co into slashing billing rates and lost a lot of business.
Unfortunately, Murthy hasn't really done this with iGate.
He has expressed his (and his company's) interest in Satyam and may have the kind of rainmaking skills the company needs to not just weather the turbulence in the US, but also talk existing clients into staying.
To this blogger, this is an interesting little sub-plot in the Satyam saga, which broke 7 January when founder and former chairman Ramalinga Raju confessed to having cokked the company's books, over the years, to the tune of at least Rs 7136 crore.
Will either Banerjee or Murthy get what they want -- a large software services company to run?

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Satyam is second chance for Phaneesh, Banerjee