JP Rangaswami - BT Design

Perhaps it is JP Rangaswami‘s knack of surviving that keeps him optimistic when economic doom and gloom is pervading the world.

Not only was the former chief information officer at investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein put in a coma 25 years ago after being assaulted by a group of skinheads, he once nearly drowned and his heart beat is regulated by a pace maker.

So it takes more than a recession to make the Calcutta-born 51 year old quake in his boots. He even sees a positive side to the economic downturn.

Rangaswami, now managing director of innovation and strategy at BT Design, the former state-owned monopoly’s IT design and delivery unit, believes the difficult economic climate in 2009 will create opportunities for those that stand out from the crowd in the fast-moving world of technology.

He says: "The market will affect everybody but recessions are actually a great time for innovation and design.
"If what you have is a valuable solution that is going to help someone get faster, cheaper and better they will bite your hand off because they are looking for radical answers."

Reining in costs will be on every businessman’s agenda this year and Rangaswami has a proven track record of trimming the fat.

He points out: "There is nothing like a good old recession to separate the men from the boys because they have the opportunity to figure out how to save money smartly."

Rangaswami was Chief Information Officer at DrKW between 2001 and 2006 and in the early years had to cut the cost base sharply. He says he looked for clever ways of saving money, such as using open source technologies - which are developed in collaboration and have non-proprietary codes - rather than just cutting jobs.

He sees learning how to make these savings as his biggest business achievement, although most of his plaudits have come in later years.

Rangaswami, ranked 11th in a list of the fifty most influential people in the worldwide technology and IT industries, is a major advocate of open source technology. The logic is that by teaming up on widely-used software, industries can save money and improve the processes.

He says: "Discovering that open source was the new outsource was a very valuable lesson at the turn of the century."
But he acknowledges there is a time and a place for it. For example, he is unlikely to download any unproven open source software for his pace maker, preferring to pay for a proprietary solution.

Being born in India and having spent half his life in the UK, he is a strong believer that talent knows no borders. He thinks the tide is turning in Britain’s and the rest of Europe’s favour for innovation.

He says: "There is a lot of disrespect given to the UK and to Europe as if all the innovation takes place in America."  But he points out Europe’s input into telecom technology, such as Skype, proves this is not true.

He says: "Silicon Valley was a great environment for entrepreneurs to operate in. There was an incredible amount of learning about how to set up an operation cheaply, get it funded and be able to run it, but that is not unique now it has been learnt in other places."

While the environment on this side of the Atlantic may not be as sophisticated there is a lot more venture capital than before – all good news for the UK entrepreneur.

Rangaswami joined BT in 2006. The design unit, with 20,000 staff, was set up when the telecoms giant put its networks, products, process and IT people into a "huge new bucket" and divided them into two – BT Design and BT Operate.

The communications playing field is changing apace, and a new breed of competitors has emerged. While many people would consider Deutsche Telekom or France Telecom as BT’s biggest rivals, Rangaswami says Google and Apple have become valid competitors. But they don’t have BT’s long history.

He says: "We have been around a long time, we have learnt a thing or two about customers over that time and we make money in so many dependable ways."

Rangaswami is an avid blogger, updating his confusedofcalcutta.com site, every two or three days. He describes himself as a "retarded hippy at heart" and says he is driven by "wanting to keep changing the world." He slept homeless earlier this year to raise money for charity and his philanthropic ways could gather pace. He once wanted to be a maths teacher and still harbours a desire to build a school one day. But he says there are still plenty of years left in his tank at BT.

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