About

After four years as a practicing litigation advocate and time spent at leading Indian law firms Thakkar & Thakkar and Juris Corp, Madhu Sivaram Muttathi first moved in-house in 2003, taking a role at IBS Software Services, a privately held technology company catering primarily to the travel, transportation and logistics sector. His primary responsibility there was to manage client deals worldwide and to provide human resources advice to the company’s business units. Subsequently, Muttathi joined Sapient Corporation, a US marketing and consulting multinational, where he was mainly responsible for providing legal and commercial support in India and certain business units beyond India. Assuming his current position in 2012 as the regional counsel of Avaya India, a global leader in business communication and collaboration solutions, Muttathi’s work now involves providing legal transactional support and strategic advice to the company’s India and South Asia operations. Illustrating the embedded nature of the legal role at Avaya, Muttathi is also on the company’s India leadership team and is a director on the India Board. During his tenure, Muttathi has been able to help the business generate significant revenue for the South Asia region by structuring, negotiating and successfully closing several high value and complex customer deals. In addition he has provided legal and commercial inputs in connection with several key initiatives such as the realignment of Avaya’s partner strategy in South Asia, the company’s expansion into new jurisdictions such as Bangladesh and Sri Lanka and has also helped streamline risk mitigation processes and policies. The role that he has played in ‘enhancing ethical awareness via periodic trainings with a focus on doing business with integrity’, has proven valuable to the expanding business. Muttathi’s says his approach in dealing with the internal and external pressures on the business is to ‘consistently collaborate with my clients in understanding the rapidly shifting priorities and core objectives of the company, which have helped to position legal as the trusted advisor to the business and allowed us to add tremendous value’.