A key task before Satish Yadav, director, IP Routing and Transport Division with Alcatel-Lucent is to ensure that the company becomes the most preferred routing vendor in India.

“India is an important market to drive our strategy,” he says. “We are strengthening our customer relevance and driving the company’s go-to-market effort to leverage our innovation-led solutions portfolio. As a part of our recently launched Shift Plan, we are determined to ensure that the region is a strong contributor to the transformation of Alcatel-Lucent from a telecom generalist to a specialist in IP networking and ultra broadband access.”

Yadav expects data traffic to increase multifold over the next four to five years owing to the growing uptake of smartphones. This, he hopes, will give a fillip to the company’s business. “With data usage gaining traction, ‘IP-fication’ will be an absolute necessity for telecom operators, as they face the challenge of managing network resources to deliver high quality bandwidth at economical rates. Rolling out new and innovative cloud-based services will be extremely important in this context,” he says.

While the reduction in capex by telecom operators over the past few years does pose a challenge, he is confident of consolidating the company’s position in the country’s networking space, driven by its innovative and vast mobile backhaul portfolio. “This will help our customers meet the challenge of delivering more capacity and coverage to their mobile networks,” he states.

What helps Yadav keep his head above water is over 15 years of work experience. A graduate from the Symbiosis Institute of Management Studies, Yadav began his career in 1996 with Zenith Computers and then moved to Ramco Systems as a network engineer. He joined Alcatel India as a systems engineer in 1999 and subsequently worked in various roles in the company’s IP division. “In 2003, I moved to Alcatel Belgium and then to Alcatel-Lucent Australia in 2007,” he says. “I have been leading Alcatel-Lucent’s IP division since I came back to the country in 2009.”

Yadav believes in leading by example. “Also, respect for others at the workplace and teamwork are important tools to succeed,” he says.

When he has time to spare, he enjoys travelling and has so far visited over 30 countries. He also likes spending time with his family.