Leaving India for Canada was the best calculated risk that Soumitra Sana, or Sammy, as he is known, ever took. It was a gamble that shaped his career and life to such an extent that he cannot imagine what his life would have been like if he had not boldly and courageously taken a flight to Toronto many years ago, on a wing and a prayer sustained only by the drive and ambition burning inside him.
North America was in the grip of recession at the time and Sana spent five months looking for a job. “It was a shock to leave a warm supportive home to be alone in deep winter. But I spent time in the library, read a lot, painted a bit and walked around the city. I got to know it so well that I was soon giving directions,” he says.
Going back to the beginning of his career, Sana, a fresh electronics and electrical communication engineering graduate from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, was a prize catch for BHEL. He joined as a trainee engineer at Ranipur in what was then Uttar Pradesh but is now Uttarakhand.
But somehow the environment at BHEL left him uninspired and unchallenged; he wanted to use his knowledge differently and acquire more knowledge fast.
“I wanted to be where products and technology were being created. Going to Canada was the best move I ever made. In life, these risks invariably pay off. In terms of what I am today, I attribute it in large part to my decision to go to Canada,” he says.
Having been the thoroughly spoilt and pampered only son, surrounded by doting parents and three equally doting elder sisters at their Kolkata home, going to Canada was also a good move in teaching him self-reliance.
“It was tough initially, but I was young. I had the spirit to cope and adapt. If I hadn’t gone, I guess I would have had the life of a technocrat or bureaucrat here,” he says wryly.
In Canada, he spent 15 years as manager of global development teams and hardware and software developer of wireline networking products. Before returning to India, Sana was director of software engineering at Motorola’s Multimedia Networking Division.
Sana initially came back for a year in 1993 to set up Motorola’s multimedia networking group. He returned in 1997 and stayed, initially as general manager, operations, for two years and then as managing director of GSG, India in 2000.
One of the reasons for his desire for his moving to India was a desire to be closer to his family. “I was thinking of getting married and I wanted to be near my family to share all this with them.” He married Suparna in 2000 and they now have twins, a two-year-old boy and girl.
While the twins keep him on his toes at home, work is no less busy. As country president of Motorola India and managing director of Motorola Software Group’s India Design Centre, his key focus area is providing strategic leadership to ensure the growth of the Motorola brand in India. He also champions Motorola’s vast business interests in the country, including sales and manufacturing, and R&D across centres in Bangalore and Hyderabad.
“We started later than our rivals. It was only a few years ago that we made a concerted effort to become more visible. So others have had a headstart. But we intend to continue building our image and believe the market is large enough to sustain everyone,” he says.
His primary focus areas, he says, are delivering “zero-defect” software on time across a broad range of Motorola products, and creating an organisation that is the best in class in execution excellence yet highly creative.
“We hope to drive the next-generation technology transitions that will eventually make seamless mobility and convergence a reality. This will include creating innovations, contributing to the standards and executing emerging technology projects,” he says.
On future trends, Sana expects mobile communications to continue growing at impressive levels. In fact, they will accelerate growth further, he says, and data services will start to grow rapidly too, “even though voice is likely to remain the killer app for some time”. He believes that traditional voice will start to be replaced by VoIP.
Sana has been a part of the information and communication technology industry for over 24 years and been involved in the development of cellular and broadband infrastructure in many areas of the world.
As MD of Motorola’s software design centre, he oversees the operations of a centre that has become the most recognised and successful among Motorola’s design centres.
His success, he says, is the fruit of his mother Manjula’s enthusiasm for education. “She was the driving force behind education for me and my sisters. She was amazing. When we moved into a new locality in Calcutta and she discovered that my sisters’ school was poor in teaching the arts and music, she set up her own school offering dance, music and art,” he says. “As for Dad, he taught me hard work and a strong sense of self-reliance. He worked hard at everything and did everything himself.”
His mother was very socially active, always helping the neighbours in their time of need. “She has been a tremendously positive influence on me and my sisters,” he says.
Although his parents live in Kolkata and Sana lives in Bangalore, the distance in no way impairs their sense of closeness.As for the Bengali in him, he defines the residual traits, after years of being outside Bengal, as being “food, festivals and the language”.
Like 98 per cent of middle-class boys, the goal when he was growing up was to become an engineer or doctor. The only difference was that his mother gave him some exposure to the arts. After completing his ISC from Don Bosco, Sana joined IIT Kharagpur.
Sana loves Bangalore although it is much more crowded than it was a decade ago. “The city has seen explosive growth.We’re bursting at the seams now although we have still managed to retain the greenery. If you walk into one of the shopping malls, it’s hard to tell whether you’re in India or somewhere else in the world.”
He has long days at the office but tries to work from home in the evenings so that he can be with Suparna and his best “stress-busters”, the twins. He schedules calls for after 9.30 p.m. so that he can have an uninterrupted dinner with the family.
Apart from reading on science and technology, Sana loves gardening.”Tending to my garden, watching the plants grow and blossom is a real joy. I love pottering around at weekends. We have a lily pool and lawn, and spend a lot of time in the garden as a family,” he says.
