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Published on July 17, 2007

Rampa Manoosin, 44, was promoted to general manager of Sun Microsystems (Thailand) early this year after working for the firm for the past 10 years.

Previously, Rampa was the marketing-communications manager before becoming marketing manager of the company. She now oversees the overall operation of the firm in Thailand, with only one executive higher than her, managing director Andrew Lim.

When she started in the marketing area of the company a decade ago she oversaw Sun's Unix systems. It was then a two-year full subsidiary company with only 12 employees. Ten years later the company has 80 employees.

She and her team have initiated and developed many marketing and channel programmes to promote the brand awareness of Sun as well as to encourage the Thai IT industry by introducing new technology, especially Java technology, both developer tools and Java Technology Forum. She has also overseen many Java initiatives between Sun and its partners, including the government and universities.

Thailand now has about 2,000 Java-certified engineers and aims to have 10,000-15,000 by 2010.

Rampa chose her current path when she was an undergraduate at ABAC University, formerly known ABAC College, 27 years ago and decided to study computer business as her major. At that time computer terms were quite new, but Rampa dared to deal with that.

She said she thought the computer area was interesting because it was dynamic and there were new technologies all the time. After she graduated from ABAC, she started her career at SVOA as a sales representative for PCs.

"At that time, when you thought of buying PCs you thought of the SVOA company. Khun Jack Min Intanate was my inspiration. When I applied for a job there I told him I was afraid I could not do sales because I was not talkative. He encouraged me and cheered me up with sentences like: 'As long as you can talk to me like this I believe you can talk to customers as well'," said Rampa.

Three years later, she moved to oversee Hitachi mainframe products. As sales manager her responsibility was to sell Hitachi mainframes, a big challenge for her at the time because, with small teams, she had to compete with the giant market leader IBM.

"Selling mainframes for the past almost 20 years was a classic task for me. The challenge was how to convince the large banks, as target customers for mainframes, to believe in our products and be confident enough to buy them. A mainframe was a big investment," said Rampa.

She proved successful with two large deals, Bangkok Bank and True Corp, formerly known as Telecom Asia. She sold Hitachi mainframes for two years before changing to join the new technology trend at that time: Unix systems. She moved from SVOA to General Data Company, selling Unix machines for only five months.

Then she moved again, to Hewlett-Packard (Thailand) as channel manager overseeing HP Unix systems for 18 months.

At the time she was moving, the overall computer industry was also moving with the change from the mainframe era to the Unix era.

"The mainframe market was limited. There were only 10 sites for the mainframe industry, and technology was changing to Unix instead," said Rampa.

Her role here was to develop HP's channel and business partners. Instead of working for distributors like SVOA and General Data, she did direct sales. After she had established strong channels for HP Unix, she was promoted to oversee the PC and printer business for corporate accounts. At this time she merged her sales skills for PCs and printers with channel skills.

Her life changed again when she became pregnant. It was a difficult pregnancy because of stress from her sales work.

"I had to choose between my son and my work. The doctor told me to stop working or to change to a job with less stress. I decided to move from sales to marketing. I moved to marketing in Sun Microsystems (Thailand) in 1997," said Rampa.

Asina Pornwasin

The Nation