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'Reinventing businesses, need of the hour'

Sukhjit Purewal
India Abroad Correspondent in Santa Clara

From the 'journey of an entrepreneur' to 'reinventing the business during uncertain times' to 'trends, challenges and opportunities', TiEcon had a lot to offer the entrepreneurs looking for an insight into the industry.

Under each of those themes, three separate discussions were on offer. The discussions which were most popular were the ones that looked at reinvention, particularly in light of the current state of the economy.

In one of the first discussions, University of Maryland Professor Anil Gupta moderated a session between Ram Gupta, executive vice-president of PeopleSoft and Shantanu Narayen, executive vice-president at Adobe.

Professor Gupta said that competitive disruption, globalisation and the capital market force firms to decide on how they will modernise services to meet consumer needs.

Both PeopleSoft and Adobe are facing a challenge and trying to adjust to a market that has virtually left them behind.

"Reinvention of a company should be a combination of evolution and revolution," said Professor Gupta. "Managers should lease strategies, not own them."

Of course, what makes it difficult to change is that you still need to bring in money during the process: much like "having to keep the plane flying while you redesign and reassemble it", he said.

Ram Gupta, who was formerly with Healtheon, said PeopleSoft realised it had to make major changes when, in 1997, everything seemed to be going wrong with the company.

"PeopleSoft had not brought any innovation to market in years." But PeopleSoft, founded in 1987, "bet the company on the Internet deciding to switch gears from client/server applications to collaborative enterprise software, " said Ram Gupta.

"We executed almost flawlessly."

That execution included bringing in stars such as Gupta and reshuffling the leadership. It also included bringing in new faces throughout the company and shutting down products that weren't profitable.

At Adobe, which has been around since 1982 and is the second largest PC maker, there was also the need to catch up with the times.

"If you want someone to reinvent your business, you want it to happen on the inside," said Shantanu Narayen.

For Adobe that meant realising that desktop publishing was the company's bread and butter and so the company focused on network publishing. Change also included firing top executives and blooding new talent, said Narayen.

Later a panel looked at 'Rules of the New Game' moderated by University of Michigan Professor C K Prahalad and co-founder and chairman of Praja Inc.

JamCracker CEO K B Chandrashekar emphasised the importance of being able to constantly reconfigure to adjust to customer needs.

"You have to be able to change according to the business opportunities presented to you."

Executive vice-president at TIBCO Software Inc, Raj Mashruwala talked about the need to make it easier for people to communicate because he said the Internet has caused an "interaction explosion.

Webex CEO Subrah Iyer, whose company provides a real-time meeting space, said the Internet must make it easy for that communication to be both fast and spontaneous.

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TiEcon 2001: Complete coverage

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