Mysore and Bangalore Days 3 and 4
By: Brett Depenbrock, MBA Candidate 2018
Wednesday January 10 our group of 16 MBAs embarked on an adventurous 4-hour bus ride through gorgeous southern Indian countryside to visit the town of Mysore. Mysore is home to a World Heritage listed palace facing the Chamundi Hills. It stands as the official residence of the Wadiyar dynasty who ruled Mysore from 1399 to 1950. After a tour of the ornate interior that featured stained glass mirrors and opulent colors, we boarded our bus with the next destination being the Indian multinational company Infosys’s fabulous training center. Infosys is India’s sixth largest publicly traded company, and it provides business consulting, information technology, and outsourcing services. Its 350-acre campus in Mysore is home to the world’s biggest corporate training facility. Infosys utilizes this space to train college graduates and prepare them for Infosys projects. Our phenomenal host and head of Infosys global recruiting Eden Fernandes explained that a skill gap exists between Indian undergraduates and the skills required to succeed in the labor force. The Mysore campus hosts recent college graduates for between lengths of three to six months to prepare them in a boot camp like fashion for the workforce. The beauty of the campus can hardly be articulated. It featured finely manicured lawns, stunning flowers, and soothing streams. The campus certainly intends to signal to its temporary residents that they have indeed made the correct company choice as they embark on their careers. At the end of our short glimpse into one of India’s most heralded company’s we boarded the bus for a return trip to Bangalore. A lengthy trip put us back in our hotel past 10 pm.
Our final day in India featured a diverse mix of company presentations. In the morning session we heard from Smith MBA graduate Tarun Goyal at his company’s office in a small space in Bangalore. An Indian by birth and youth, Goyal spent the early part of his career in the United States after Smith where he gathered invaluable experience doing product management at ecommerce and enterprise software firms such as Amazon and Expedia. A yearning to start a company and to return to his roots in India drove his decision to return home to start Simplotel. Simplotel is a hotel technology that offers software-as-a-service (SaaS) to help hotels drive more bookings through all their channels – website, online, and offline. In a 2-hour Q&A Goyal spoke about his experiences forming a startup in India, and the challenges he continues to face in recruiting high caliber talent and expanding his business in new markets. The opportunity to not only hear from an entrepreneur, but a Smith alum was quite a thrill. Our final visit of the day included a visit to Infosys’s world headquarters at its Bangalore campus. Less ostentatious than its Mysore training facility, the Bangalore campus was nonetheless impressive. Here Infosys hosted our cohort for a delicious lunch and a couple presentations from marketing and finance experts at the company. Infosys certainly succeeded in making our group feel welcomed and honored. Amidst the war for competitive software talent in India, it was apparent in Infosys presentations that is working avidly to brand itself as an innovative and creative large corporation.
Our whirlwind tour across New Delhi, Agra, Bangalore, and Mysore was finally complete. Our cohort was certainly blessed to hear from the diverse range of business perspectives, and to have the opportunity to ask incisive questions to the experienced presenters. The international component was an extremely rich and exciting experience, and I am certain that this brief introduction to India has broadened and enhanced my understanding of global business.
