After graduating in commerce from Delhi University, Sanjiv Bhagat started his career in 1986 with HCL (later HCL-Hewlett Packard) in the banking application group. Despite his non-engineering background, he became a technical specialist in the company.

The turning point in his career came when he heard that IBM had entered India in 1992 through a joint venture (JV). The very name was iconic for Bhagat, enough to make him instantly accept a job offer, again as a technical specialist. Later, though, he moved to sales, an area in which he excelled partly because of the advantage he enjoyed over others owing to his experience in the technical field. He rose up the ranks to become country manager for the company’s global network function.

The second big landmark was moving to AT&T India in 2000 as country manager for managed services. “The telecom sector at that time had just opened for mobility/telephony and Indian private players were gearing up to get into it. We needed to look at viable business opportunities to get a good grip on the market and make multinationals in India aware of AT&T’s brand,” he says.

The company went on to develop professional services mainly in the area of networking. It was, as he says, “like an entrepreneur setting up a business but with the backing of a big brand”.

His most memorable assignment was in 2006 when foreign direct investment (FDI) in telecom was raised to 74 per cent, opening up a business opportunity in this sector. “Right from working on business cases to setting up a JV in which AT&T held 74 per cent, to getting the telecom licences to set up infrastructure and processes, and acquiring customers, it was a very challenging but very satisfying experience,” he says.

Bhagat was managing director of the JV company, AT&T Global Network Services India, and became chairman of the board and chief executive officer (CEO) of the JV in 2011. In this position, he is responsible for the South Asia business, which includes India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan. However, the major business remains within India where he says the dramatic improvement in telecom infrastructure has been accompanied by a parallel rise in customer expectations.

In fact, telecom infrastructure is no longer the issue, he says; it’s now all about reliability. At the same time, bandwidth/ network has become incidental because customers are looking at service providers, such as AT&T, to take end-to-end responsibility for their applications.

Bhagat is proud of the company’s long and illustrious history. With eight Nobel prizes and more than 10,000 active patents, the company regards innovation as a categorical imperative to improve customer experience.

On future trends, Bhagat says that, with the convergence of IT and telecom services, there is a clear trend for internet of things (IoT) and digital life. “Our priorities are very clear: our services need to be virtual, ultra-fast and enable enterprise mobility. With our application services, we aim to provide customers with solutions they can use anywhere and anytime they need. In the current scenario, enterprise customers are looking for more and more virtual and mobile solutions with speed. This, in turn, drives the need for higher availability and security,” he says.

With this vision of IoT/digital life in mind, the company is focused on delivering machine-to-machine solutions that can transform an enterprise through the power of a network. All these will need robust, secure and highly available cloud applications and services. The telecom trend will be driven more by these market/customer needs.

Most of the company’s current customers are Indian multinationals going global and foreign multinationals that have a strong presence in India. The key segments AT&T works with are IT, finance and manufacturing. It provides global connectivity and application services to its customers in India. Key application services include unified communications, applications and cloud, security, and content delivery solutions.

Bhagat points to World Bank predictions saying that India’s growth is expected to inch closer to that of China in the near future. By 2015, India’s growth rate is expected to be 7 per cent. That is why India continues to be a priority market for most of AT&T’s global MNC customers.

“Our customers among these companies have told us that enhanced communications services between India and the rest of the world are a key factor in helping them grow and be more competitive. We provide global connectivity services and business application solutions to MNCs in India. We expect India to remain a strategic priority for AT&T in the long term,” he says.

The company has seen a fairly broad-based demand from different industries, including professional services, outsourcing and high technology companies, financial firms and others.

“The vision for AT&T India is to be in alignment with our global vision, and at the same time, be a preferred partner for our customers in India to help grow their business globally,” he says.

Last year, the company signed a deal with Bharti Airtel to expand its enterprise reach. AT&T, which rivals British Telecom, Orange Business Services, SingTel, Verizon, etc. has already expanded its resource base in India. The deal with Bharti Airtel is one of the strategies to increase its presence. The two companies signed a network-to-network interconnect agreement to allow AT&T customers to access more than 100 cities across India via Bharti Airtel’s more than 130 MPLS-enabled IP network nodes.

In terms of work style, Bhagat says he sees himself as a people’s man and team worker. He believes that the company is as good as its employees and that dictates that employees should be satisfied and should upgrade their skills continuously. “Delegation is a must. I believe in empowering employees as it motivates the team by making them responsible and accountable. One key thing in teamwork is to contribute based on what your role in that specific project team is and what you are required to do; it is not based on your level in the organisation,” he explains.

Bhagat thinks of himself as a straightforward person and considers this as one of his strengths; however he concedes that, in certain situations, it may go against him as he could be perceived to be “politically wrong”. The personality that you see at work is one that has been moulded by admiration for his role models, his father and his eldest brother, who both have a never-say-die attitude.

“My journey as a technocrat started as a hobby when my eldest brother, who was working outside India, got a home computer, a Commodore-64, which could also be programmed to play games and do some serious stuff. That really hooked me to the fascinating things that a computer could do,” he says.

As to his father, well, Bhagat, as the youngest, was his blue-eyed boy who could not take a step wrong. He wanted to do too many things after finishing his commerce degree, including wanting to join a hotel management programme. However, since computers really interested him, he joined HCL-HP, and also squeezed in an executive MBA from the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad.

The first 15 years of his working life were very hectic. “All the credit of my success goes to my wife and my family as they understand my work pressures. Now too, there are sometimes long working hours. A characteristic day entails a lot of time spent on setting strategy, direction and vision. But over the years, I have learnt to manage my time and have a much better work-life balance than what it used to be,” he says.

No doubt a great source of satisfaction must be the growth that Bhagat has presided over. It has six offices in India, and serves around 400 global multinational customers in the country. Revenues have grown in double digits since the company first received its licences in 2006.

Away from the office, Bhagat enjoys going on vacations with his family, especially driving to remote places in Himachal Pradesh. In the past three years, he has picked up a new hobby – wildlife photography – but he says he is still learning. At weekends, he can be found in the kitchen, cooking the Sunday lunch.