Vinod Dham to be next Satyam Chairman?

According to a corporate lawyer, if Raju resigns, one of the options before the board could be to appoint one of the independent directors as a chairman or managing director. The other option could be to appoint other investor nominees as chairman or managing director. "But this possibility appears remote as financial investors may not be willing to take the onus of running the company," said a corporate lawyer, who wished not to be identified.

Institutional investors led by Aberdeen Asset Management, Fidelity and ICICI Prudential hold a 61% stake in Satyam, several times the 8.5% stake held by the family of the company's founder and chairman Ramalinga Raju. The resignation of Srinivasan, who was on the Satyam board for over 17 years, has also added pressure on other directors to follow her example.

Vinod completed his undergraduate education in Electrical Engineering from the Delhi College of Engineering. In 1971, after graduation, he joined a Delhi-based semiconductor company called Continental Devices. In 1975, he left this job and joined University of Cincinnati to pursue a masters degree in Electrical Engineering, where he specialized in Solid State Science. After completing his masters degree in 1977, he joined NCR Corporation at Dayton, Ohio. He then joined Intel, and started working on the Pentium chip. He is called the "Father of Pentium" for his role in the development of the Pentium processor. He is also one of the co-inventers of non-volatile flash memory. He rose to the position of vice-president of Intel. He left Intel in 1995, and joined a number of startups including NexGen, which was acquired by AMD, and then went on to Silicon Spice, which was acquired by Broadcom in 2000. He is also the co-founding partner of New Path Ventures which has funded Companies like Nevis Networks. In an interview, Dham revealed that he came to the United States with only "$8 in his pocket".