Sudha Kumar's Prayag Consulting helps high tech companies to strengthen their marketing

After eight years at Infosys Technologies when the restlessness bug bit Sudha Kumar, she could have simply moved on to another role within the IT major itself or perhaps to another company. Kumar chose to do neither. An electronics engineer from Anna University, Chennai and a post graduate in business management from the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. Kumar saw a huge opportunity in offering marketing services for high tech companies. Armed with her experience at Infosys, Kumar decided to venture out on her own and set up her own strategic marketing consultancy firm, Prayag Consulting, specifically targeted at the IT and high tech industry.

Says Kumar: "Marketing was and in fact still in a very under leveraged function in the Indian technology industry. Most companies don't realize that the strategic quality of their go-to-market plan and the ability to execute this plan is what determines the winners and long-term players."

This is a lesson that Kumar herself learnt from Infosys founders N.R.Narayana Murthy and Nandan Nilekani during her tenure there. It was in 1993, after a four year stint with management consulting firm A F Ferguson that Kumar joined Infosys to set up its corporate planning function. At that time Infosys was a small company with barely 400 employees. It did not have a formal corporate planning division and the role was being handled primarily by the founders themselves. With the company aiming for high growth, Infosys felt the need to define this function more clearly and brought in Kumar to head it.

In 1997 Kumar moved to a marketing role within Infosys where she was actively involved in conceptualizing, planning and implementing a global marketing programme with particular emphasis on building the Infosys brand. Recalls Kumar: "At that time when the sales people went knocking on the doors of prospective customers nobody knew of Infosys and my main role was to help build the Infosys brand."

During a four - year period Kumar was responsible for launching various initiatives. She put together a systematic market-tracking programme, a framework for launching new services, multi-pronged client relationship, global analyst and media management, internal branding and brand metrics etc.

At Infosys, Kumar got an insight into the ecosystem of the IT industry in the US and she felt that just like the Indian IT companies had proven that outsourcing and off-shoring could work, there was tremendous scope for working with technology companies, both Indian and global, in a partnership model on the marketing  front.

Aided with this conviction Kumar started Prayag Consulting in 2001 with a two-member team and a portfolio offering research, branding, and business development support and providing content. Her first two clients were Wipro and Delhi based InterGlobe Technologies, a niche player offering IT and BPO services in the travel segment. Over the past six year Kumar's team has grown to 25 and she has worked with around 60 companies. Kumar's client list includes three Fortune 50 companies, three of India's top 5 IT service companies, two of top 15 BPO companies, Indian entrepreneurs and Silicon Valley start-ups.

Kumar's work with Wipro for instance includes market research and research based communications. For Intelenet Global, among other things the Prayag team has helped to build a pre-sales tool that it uses to hold workshops with prospective clients. For Microsoft India, Prayag works with some of the programmes that Microsoft runs to augment the local software ecosystem. One such programme was to identify and profile innovative emerging product companies from India. Says Kumar: "The booklet created as an outcome of this exercise is used widely by Microsoft in and outside India. Some of these companies have participated and have been showcased in Microsoft’s Innovative Summit held in Bangalore last year." Prayag is partnering with Microsoft for the same initiative this year also.

Says Naresh Ponnapa, chief executive officer at Indecomm Global Services: "Prayag has exceeded its initial brief of providing backend marketing support to our business development team in the US and have contributed significantly in branding Indecomm as amongst the premier technology-based BPO providers from India" Adds Jessie Paul, Chief Marketing officer at Wipro Technologies: "Sudha’s strength is that she understands both marketing and the IT industry and is therefore able to offer a unique proposition to her clients."