"My People Are The Best..."

What's CA's secret of success?
Very simple: good people. I have the best people in the industry. I have created the environment, a culture, where you can thrive and win and really have a future, a career.

Your toughest challenges...
The most challenging thing has been to keep my workforce motivated and ensure that their talent is recognised at not only the company but across the world because the last thing you would want to have is what is known in the US as "egos in, turkeys out", which means the belief that new people are the best and the old ones not as good. That's where you lose because those people on whom you have invested, including training and correcting them, are lost.

You don't seem to believe in run-of-the-mill methods...
My philosophy is to be different and that there's no company like us. There's no manual that says this is how you build a company. You must trust your instincts, listen to your people, to the market and do what you think is right. That does not mean always following what somebody else says. When everybody said the mainframe is dead, we said it would live. If you have mainframes, you got to have servers; you'll have Internet and things you and I haven't even thought about. That's got to be the real world.

What makes you tick?
It's how to make our clients successful with the use of our technology so that they employ it beyond the traditional scope of accounting productivity and build their business. We want to be their global standard.

You have been attributed with the largest number of mergers and acquisitions in corporate history. Why choose this route?
Our company has been built based on a three-pronged strategy. Internal development - we have developed more software products than anyone else. We could because our background is technical, we understand technology and the market. The second strategy is acquisitions. We have acquired key client bases, key people, key technology. The third is integration. We integrate what we developed with what we acquired. Take Platinum, which we recently acquired. In 12 years, it acquired 70 companies. But it could not develop its own products or integrate. It looked like a supermarket of software. CA has the right infrastructure and foundation to integrate. We took the 70 companies, their products and started to integrate. It's wrong to say we take only the acquisition route.

Isn't it unusual that you don't have an e-mail address...
If I'm supposed to help set the vision, the strategy, I should not be involved in day-to-day operations. If I focus on e-mails, then I'm not spending the right amount of time in seeing where the company is going. I also think that if you set a strategy and vision, you don't get that through e-mail. You've got to sit with your people, your clients and talk to them.

How do you assess India's prowess in software development?
India has a tremendous technical talent pool. It's evident from the number of projects it handles globally and from the number of people who emigrate. But just being a low-cost and technical talent provider is not the future. Software development prowess, commercialisation prowess and exports aren't here yet. We plan to build the IT industry in India, China and Korea.

When do you see this happening in this country?
This has to happen fast because what is a long time in the IT industry - two years? But I guess it will take a few years.

How was your journey from an immigrant to the top of the world's most vibrant software company?
A lot of fun. There was a struggle because nothing comes just like that. But even at CA, we believe we have just started. We are still moving around software to make us more efficient. We have to create values to start to think with the software and predict things.

In India a lot of stress is put on computer education....
We don't need all that education. The technology is there, you can talk to computers, you have touch screens, intuitive interfaces. They make all such extensive education redundant.

A passion for cooking and software development. Well, how do you combine these two?
One is instant gratification. The other takes a long, long time. In cooking, you have an instant response and you know where you stand and it's therapeutic as you create it and enjoy it immediately. In IT, it could be quite different.