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Bangalore
Labs (BL) was established in November 1999 as an infrastructure
solution provider. The company was founded by the famous ‘Tiger’
Ramesh. TG Ramesh, the chief executive officer of BL Asia, is known
as ‘Tiger’. He and four other founding members set up
BL, which has grown to 60 people with experiences in various technologies
and consulting. Their sales offices are located in Delhi and Chennai
and the company is planning to open another facility in Hyderabad.
Recently BL has employed three people for their newest office in
Australia. BL is a focused IT infrastructure management company
with two divisions—the Consulting Solutions Group that offers
organisations solutions for enterprise management, security and
infrastructure management. The other division is the Managed Services
Group that offers company managed security and infrastructure services.
BL
employees are known as Blitzers. Their team is young, vibrant and
energetic with an average age of 27 years. 95 percent of the employees
have an engineering background and are from RECs, IITs and IIITB.
35 percent of them have an MBA degree from IIM or Symbiosis, Pune.
The Blitzer team has a good combination of expertise in the infrastructure
space with a proven track record in their respective specialisations.
People from Lever, IBM, Accenture, PWC, Infosys, Wipro, Motorola,
Nortel, HCL, Citicorp, Cambridge Technology Partners, Cable &
Wireless and Microland have come together to create BL. The average
experience of its employees is roughly five years.
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WORKCULTURE:
Bangalore Labs
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Harshavardhan
Lale, network engineer and consultant at BL, says, “I joined
nine months back as a fresher. I chose BL because it’s a start-up
company and one of the early adopters of technology in managed service
providers (MSP) and managed security services (MSS). With just nine
months of experience I am looking after the Network Operating Centre
(NOC) as a consultant. The opportunity for growth is unlimited in
BL. You can change your field if you not satisfied with your work.”
Leena
Christi, head-human resources, BL says, “The common thread
we look for is integrity combined with the highest personal ethical
standards. We are looking for people who will not bend even under
severe pressure in the workplace. We look for ambitious and competitive
people who are spurred by competition, set high personal goals and
standards and are passionate about the quality of their work. It
is very critical that an individual carries desirable attitudes,
beliefs and behaviours as our internal process and culture is binding
on these.” 25 percent of requirement happens at campuses of
RECs, IIITB, Symbiosis and IIMs.
All
freshers have to go through 45 to 60 days of training. The objective
of initial training is to transform fresh recruits into corporate
types—to build their personality and hone their non-existent
readiness to the point where they can understand the technology
and services. Technology training helps in grooming them to be business
and technology consultants. After completion of the programme, the
company puts newcomers through a six-month long monitoring programme
and allots work on different functions. The training is conducted
in-house to a large extent and specialised training if required
is either sponsored or provided by hiring an external instructor.
“Our
organisational structure is equipped to enable effective customer
responsiveness, achieve internal synergies from flexible capability
deployment and ensure the retention of a small company’s soul—keeping
things simple and non-bureaucratic,” says Christi. Every individual
recruited goes through three rounds of one-on-one interviews—human
resource (behavioural training and soft skills), a functional interview
and a personal meeting with the CEO.
For
freshers, Christi says, “We prefer those with a good academic
track record and high confidence in presentations. Analytical abilities
help. For business development posts we look for skills in communication
and negotiation. For senior technical consultants we prefer a candidate
who has handled large corporate clients and has good contacts in
the industry.”
Employee
motivation and satisfaction
Priya
Krishnan, associate vice president-business development, says, “I
had worked with Andersen and PWC as a consultant. After joining
BL two years ago I realised my potential in sales and marketing.
I put up a request and here I am heading business development of
BL. I think no other company will be as flexible as BL.” Christi
adds, “We have many formal and informal ways of getting feedback
whether the employee is satisfied or not. We have informal open
sessions every month called ‘Coke and samosa meet’—this
is an avenue for hearing out our employees and giving organisational
updates. One of the formal ways is through the Blitzer Excellence
Program (BEP)—a performance management system that provides
quarterly feedback while mentoring in a non-invasive setting that
makes informal communication possible.”
BL
has several innovative programmes to motivate its employees. One
such initiative is the ‘Mask’ role, which is organised
by the HR team and played occasionally during the first half of
the day. Employees have to identify the masked person. Other programmes
are—identify my childhood photo, bowling event and mass movie.
Christi says, “During our annual event we give recognition
to employees in front of their families. This is a big morale booster.
We have a quarterly performance award that is given by the CEO.
Because of these factors we have been able to keep our attrition
rate at six percent.
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