Pankaj Mathur, Director and Vice-President, Sales, Orange Business Service
In a career spanning over 25 years, Pankaj Mathur has been associated with several companies across the telecom and IT domains. He started his career with DCM Data Systems and went on to hold leadership positions at IBM, HP and ACME Telepower, providing multifunctional sales, marketing and support services as well as driving continuous improvements in achieving revenues and profitability objectives. He has helped reposition, restructure and reskill global organisations to be more relevant to the Indian market.
Currently, as a core member of the leadership team, Mathur leads global sales for the India market at Orange Business Service, the enterprise arm of Orange SA, formerly France Telecom. His current focus is on the enterprise business, which has over 250 customers across the country. “We are the enterprise arm of a telecom company providing voice, video and data solutions to customers across the world. We have expanded into the public cloud, besides already having a strong presence in private cloud offerings,” he says.
Given his vast experience, Mathur has seen the telecom and IT industry grow from its early days to today’s virtual world of hand-helds and social media. The main challenge is to keep pace with technology, he feels, as infrastructure solutions get more software and cloud driven. “Today a lot of system integration and managed services, rather than pure hardware, come into play. At Orange, we ensure that we are skilled in every new technology in this space so that our customers are able to keep pace with the fast changing technology landscape,” he notes. Orange provides network and IT services across organisations to enable them in their digital transformation journey.
Mathur’s core strength lies in creating and implementing transformational strategies that result in high profitability and growth. His previous experience as director, public sector, HP, proved useful when Orange bid for and won various government projects in over five states in India.
Mathur feels that people can change and thus, a leader should provide them with direction and give them space to improve. He likes to build a consensus in his teams. Mathur has an MBA from the Faculty of Management Studies, Delhi University. When not at work, he likes to read and spend time with his family, which includes his parents, his wife, who retails her own brand of children’s clothing, and their two children. “My most memorable moments are playing golf and chess with my son,” he says.
