Shyam Mardikar of Airtel joins Lebara as CTO

Shyam Mardikar, who resigned as senior vice president of strategy, architecture and engineering, Bharti Airtel, joined Lebara, one of the leading MVNOs in Europe as CTO in December 2010.

The Lebara Group was founded in 2001 by Rasiah Leon, Baskaran Kandiah and Ratheesan Yoganthan who shared a vision to transform the international calling market, making it easier for migrant communities to stay in touch with friends and family back home.

Lebara Mobile has created a profitable and sustainable business model, tried and tested since 2004. It offers simple to use pre-paid or Pay As You Go mobile SIM cards that are compatible with all standard mobile handsets.

Nine years on and Lebara is one of the world’s fastest growing mobile companies with more than 1200 employees worldwide, operations in eight countries and revenues for 2009 totalling €371 million.

He is currently responsible for implementation and execution of the company's technology strategy and aligning the technology vision with the business strategy. Shyam, who was one of the well known faces of Airtel at many technology forums in India, is heading both the network as well as IT organization at Lebara. Shyam is based in London. Lebara is one the biggest 'ethnic' MVNOs operating out of 8 European countries and Australia.

Before joining Lebara, Shyam Mardikar was responsible for creating the overall network strategy and architecture blueprint for Airtel. Shyam has more than 17 years of experience in telecom industry.

Prior to this , Shyam worked with Department of Telecommunications, Government of India, in various capacities of network planning, deployment and operations. He started his carrier with C-DOT, Government of India, where he was part of the software development team.

He has spearheaded large operations both directly and through a managed services partner and has led transformation projects to scale the network architecture to a staggering 140 Million when he was with Bharti Airtel.