It was like riding a tiger, said Ramalinga Raju, chairman of newly tarnished Indian IT services provider Satyam, not knowing how to get off without being mauled. He was, of course, referring to the massive fraud he was perpetrating at the company – inflating the company's balance sheet with £628m of non-existent revenues – and the difficulties of telling people about it.

Now that the fraud has come to light, Raju will undoubtedly get a mauling. My heart doesn't exactly bleed at the prospect.

(As an aside, I suspect that analyst group Frost & Sullivan is rather regretting the award it recently gave to Raju. It is very mean-spirited of my to point it out, but the press release announcing it just jumped out at me, while I was trawling through Satyam's web site to do some research. And on the basis that I if I didn't point it out someone else would…)

Instead, my thoughts turn to Satyam's customers – and executives at well-respected firms such as Nissan, Sony, Nestle and Caterpillar. It is those customers that are really going to be affected this scandal.

Many IT leaders will have, until very recently, have been comfortable in their contract with Satyam. They would have had little reason to suspect the proverbial was about to hit the fan, and provided they were receiving the quality of service they had contracted for, all would have been tickety-boo.

Today, things look very different. And while Satyam's board has set up a customer out-reach programme to assuage fears, and is looking to assure its workforce, massive uncertainty will remain.

It seems likely that the company will be acquired, but until a deal is wrapped up the company will fester. The highly-skilled workforce could hardly be blamed for looking for a more stable employer – and once the best people go, the company's customers will then suffer some more.