By IANS,
Bangalore : Wipro czar Azim H. Premji has made changes in the top management structure of the global software major, rewarding the head honchos of its IT business units.
Premji, who still retains a majority equity holding (79 percent) in the IT bellwether, has appointed financial services president Girish Paranjpe, chief financial officer (CFO) Suresh Senapaty and Wipro Infotech president Suresh Vaswani as directors to the board of Wipro Ltd.
“The inclusion of the top three members will add richness and breadth to the board,” Premji told reporters here Friday at a briefing on the company’s financial performance during the fourth quarter (January-March) of fiscal 2007-08.
Paranjpe and Vaswani have also been promoted as joint CEOs of the restructured global IT business, which is the flagship division of the $4.9 billion (Rs.200 billion) tech behemoth.
“We are transitioning our leadership to a pair of joint CEOs who together give twice the leverage to seize the emerging opportunities in the global IT arena. Girish and Suresh have been close partners in spearheading the growth of Wipro’s IT business over the last decade,” Premji affirmed.
Paranjpe has been with Wipro since 1990 and has moved on to business leadership roles from similar roles in the finance function. Prior to his elevation, he was the president of the banking, financial services and insurance business unit of the global IT business.
Vaswani, who has been with Wipro since 1985, held multiple leadership positions culminating in top posts. Till recently, he was president of Wipro Infotech, which caters to India, Middle East and Asia Pacific regions.
Senapaty, who joined Wipro in 1980, has been its CFO since 1985.
“Our journey over the last few years has been one of fast paced growth in all its dimensions. We have expanded our global reach, added an impressive list of valued customers and built a strong Wipro team, which we are proud of. We believe Wipro has huge potential to grow aggressively and strengthen its leadership position in the IT space,” Premji noted.
Meanwhile, enterprise solutions business president Sudip Banerjee has been made director on the advisory board of PremjiInvest (PI), the private equity firm of Premji. As an investment entity, it manages Premji’s non-Wipro portfolio business.
Premji also restructured the consulting business by bringing in various consulting practices that were embedded into each of the service lines and competency groups under Wipro Consulting Services (WCS).
“The objective of WCS will include upstream business transformation consulting, building IT strategy for customers and helping clients build business solutions that leverage IT. WCS will have about 1,000 consultants spread across Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India and Asia Pacific,” Premji said.
The company has also decided to combine the business units of its global IT services and products (Wipro Technologies) and its IT hardware products, solutions and services in India, the Middle East and Asia Pacific (Wipro Infotech) into a common entity.
“We are seeing huge potential in India and Middle East markets with considerable investments being planned by our customers. As our global IT business has built domain and transformational capabilities, we believe it is appropriate to leverage both the businesses and synergise their operations for critical scale on a combined basis,” Premji added.