Consultant Mercer to suggest Polaris-OrbiTech pay parity

Venkatachari Jagannathan
11 January 2003

Chennai: As a part of their integration process, Polaris Software Lab and OrbiTech Solutions have hired the US-based Mercer to look at the employee payscales and suggest measures to bring in uniformity. It is said that OrbiTech employees get higher pay than compared to Polaris.

About the integration process Ashok Korwar, advisor, CEO office, Polaris, says: “The two companies have chosen leadership teams to synergise the human relations and other business activities. We have identified around 50 projects for implementing the best practices and will later extend it to all other projects. For the past couple of months employee teams are working on that.”

According to him both the companies have integrated their recruitment and portal strategies. “Decisions on employee promotions are also taken jointly.”

The biggest issue facing Polaris post-merger is realigning its business focus. Traditionally a services company - OrbiTech being its major client - Polaris is transforming into a product company acquiring 57 software products owned by OrbiTech. “Selling products and bidding for projects require two different models,” says Korwar. Joint bidding for projects have already started. “We have bagged a couple of orders in Germany.”

While competitors like i-flex Solutions are selling banking software products worldwide, Polaris lags far behind. The company’s BankWare division sells banking software product of an American company. Polaris and its top management had got into a spot while selling that software to Bank Artha Graha, Indonesia.

Dissatisfied with the quality and delivery delays, the bank had filed a criminal complaint against Arun Jain, chairman and managing director and CEO, and senior vice-president Rajiv Malhotra. The duo was jailed in Jakarta for eight days.