When Sudhakar Ram, chairman and managing director of IT solutions firm Mastek passed out of the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, in 1982 with a silver medal in hand, he opted to work for a little-known advertising agency Rediffusion than a blue-chip firm or bank. It was a gamble the young Ram, who majored in finance, was taking. But the man loves to gamble.

Rediffusion was no stranger to him. He?d completed his summer project there while studying at the IIM. ?I liked the culture and vision of the agency,? he says. ?I decided to join them after graduating from the institute.?

It was an unconventional beginning no doubt. But this wasn?t going to be the end of it. He took another unconventional plunge in 1984. This was in information technology, then a fledgling industry. His company of choice Mastek was again no stranger to him. They were his agency?s software partners. Ram had been interacting with them as part of his mandate to leverage technology to improve the agency?s overall services and processes. It was uncommon for an agency then to think on those lines. But Rediffusion was at the centre of it and Ram was part of the project. ?It was an ambitious project,? he says. But budgets were low. I learnt a lot while I was there.?

His decision to move to Mastek was triggered in part by the growth prospects it presented. The company was a start-up at that point, but Ram was excited enough to join them. ?I felt there were more avenues and opportunities available to me there,? he says.

47-year-old Ram?s interest in technology as well as a strong grounding in business thanks to his IIM degree were the other key motivators for his decision to join Mastek. It helped that running a business enterprise was in his genes, given the fact that his father and grandfather were entrepreneurs in the south of India. All of this endeared him to the original founders Ashank Desai, R Sundar and Ketan Mehta, who immediately inducted him into the start-up team as the fourth founding member. ?We are different as individuals,? says Ram. ?Ashank is an institution builder. His focus is the long term and he?s the one who put the systems in place at the company. Sundar is very creative, high-tech and start-up intense. Ketan is the most extroverted of the lot. He?s able to build relationships, look for acquisitions and keep the team together. I can look at the big picture. I?m a patient listener and strong communicator. Despite our individual personalities, we?ve had a shared set of values. That?s what kept us together. Mastek stands for management and software technology. Our objective was to bridge the gap between business and technology. All of us had B-school degrees and our first jobs were in technology. So, we wanted to leverage technology to help an organisation achieve its business goals and objectives.?

Ram and his colleagues realised they could do this by addressing the needs of companies in the domestic marketplace. They bucked the trend then with this move. Most IT companies were focussing their attention abroad by offering their services to clients there. Mastek, however, kept its focus on India. It made sense in a way because many domestic companies were slowly but steadily waking up to the need for IT to manage their systems and processes in a better manner. Says Ram, ?We began by doing enterprise applications during the early stages of IT in India. Slowly, we moved to doing complex enterprise projects for companies such as Hindustan Unilever, Procter & Gamble and Citibank. All of this helped us understand how to deploy technology, what were the issues involved in change management, implementation and so on. We were able to architect products based on our learnings in the domestic market.?

These products were then used by the company to gain a foothold in the global marketplace. Says Ram, ?We had a solutions model to a services model, which is adopted by most other IT companies. We were different in that sense.? At the time of going public in 1992, for instance, Mastek had 70% of its business coming out of India, 30% from abroad. Over the years, however, the company has focussed its attention on improving its international presence in markets such as the US, the UK, Europe and North America. The US, in particular, is a market that Ram has been keenly involved with. He shifted base to the US a few years ago to understand the market dynamics there and build his company presence. His efforts have paid off with the US emerging a key market for Mastek today apart from the UK, where the company has been awarded a 10-year contract for a project with the National Health Service. Meanwhile, the company has also completed two acquisitions in the US ? Vector and STG ? to strengthen its insurance vertical in the market. ?We are not averse to domestic acquisitions,? he says. ?What we require are strong domain focussed companies that can add to our expertise. There are not many here, but if we do get something, we?d be open to it. Currently the international market offers us more options in our areas of operation.?

All of this is part of Ram?s vision to increase the impact of the company in the global arena. Though scale though is not something he is after. At under Rs 1,000 crore, Mastek is still a mid-sized company after 25 years in existence. Players such as Infosys, which began around the same time that Mastek did in the early 1980s, are miles ahead of the latter in terms of turnover. But Ram maintains that he is not in the business of scale at all. ?We are not a broad-based services player,? he says. ?We are a focussed solutions provider. Our acquisitions and investments would be in a chosen few verticals. The idea would be to dominate our areas of operation globally.?

Mastek at the moment has some 1,000 domain experts in the insurance vertical alone, which is a key one for the company. The other important vertical? government?is an area the company got into some 13 years ago. Ram is not averse to adding more business verticals in the future. He says, ?We are looking at parts of financial services, especially, the wealth management area. As more people retire especially in the western world, there will be need to leverage technology in this area to help manage their wealth better. We would like to get into that. Secondly, we would like to create a healthcare vertical across the world. We have solid experience in the healthcare arena on account of our work with the National Health Service in the UK. We would like to leverage that experience across the globe.?

As the head of a growing company, Ram can barely find time for himself.

Says he, ?I travel every month to India and supervise operations of the company across the globe.? But whatever little time he does get, he spends with wife Girija and daughter Samvitha.

?I love watching movies and reading. I think it?s a great way to relax.? Ram also plays the piano. For a busy executive like him, there?s nothing like music to the ears.

Fact File

* Sudhakar Ram is chairman & managing director, Mastek, a Rs 916-crore IT solutions provider

* Areas of operation: insurance, government

* Plans: To add a few more verticals including wealth management and healthcare in the next few years

* Scale is not on the agenda of the company. The idea is to be a leader in a few key verticals across the globe

* Acquired Vector and STG, two solution providers in the insurance space, in US