 "Anand Padmanabhan")
In a move possibly aimed at creating a second leadership rung within the company, Wipro, India’s third-largest information technology (IT) services company, is learnt to have promoted Anand Padmanabhan to the post of president. Padmanabhan will continue to head the company’s energy, natural resources and utilities business unit as chief executive.
Wipro has not had a president since January 2011, when T K Kurien, then president of Wipro EcoEnergy, was elevated to the post of chief executive officer of the company’s IT services business.
Traditionally, Wipro has promoted its presidents to the post of chief executive officer. Girish Paranjpe and Suresh Vaswani, joint CEOs of Wipro’s IT services business before Kurien, were presidents, too. While Paranjpe was president of the banking, financial services and insurance unit of Wipro’s IT business, Vaswani headed Wipro Infotech (the company’s India, West Asia and Asia-Pacific IT business) and the technology infrastructure, enterprise applications and testing service lines as president.
Sources say while Padmanabhan’s elevation does not mean he has been made a clear number two in the company, the move is being seen as an acknowledgement of the performance of the business units he heads. The energy, natural resources and utilities vertical is one of Wipro’s fastest-growing units, accounting for 17 per cent of the company’s overall revenues. For the quarter ended September, the unit reported sequential growth of 6.9 per cent, the highest among Wipro’s business units.
“Wipro Ltd can confirm Anand Padmanabhan, who has played a catalytic role in building the energy, natural resources & utilities business of Wipro into one among the top three IT solution providers to that industry globally, has been promoted as president and chief executive of the ENU (energy, natural resources and utilities) business,” Wipro said in a e mailed reply to a query by Business Standard. It added there wouldn’t be any change in Padmanabhan’s role, responsibilities or reporting structure.
A few months ago, Wipro had re-designated some of its business units’ service lines heads as chief executives to decentralise decision making. Including Padmanabhan, the company has nine chief executives.
