Customers of troubled Indian outsourcing provider Satyam Computer Services should guard against overreacting to Wednesday’s dramatic news that the fast-growing company has been vastly overstating its revenue and assets for several years, experts said today.
Although the revelations accompanying the sudden resignation of Satyam’s Chairman and Co-Founder Ramalinga Raju have led to speculation about the future of the 53,000-employee company, manufacturers with long-standing relationships with Satyam would do well to see how the scandal affects Satyam’s operations before rushing to another provider of outsourcing services, said Ray Wang, a vice president at analyst firm Forrester Research Inc.
“It’s important for customers to keep this in perspective,” Wang told Managing Automation. “What’s important is the employees and managers at Satyam [that] you work with on a daily basis. It’s likely that, if something happened and the company were split up, existing employees would continue to provide service. Customers need to separate the people working the accounts [from] the top management of the company.”
At the same time, however, prospective customers might want to think twice about doing business with Satyam at this time, Wang said.