Wipro's emerging market solutions VP quits

Wipro, India's third-largest IT services firm, has seen one more top level exits in its IT services business. I Vijaya Kumar (IVK), the former chief technology officer (CTO) of Wipro’s IT business who is now vice president of Emerging Market Solutions, has quit the company. 

Kumar, who had spent about 20 years in Wipro, was the CTO of the company till April this year when he was replaced by Anurag Srivastava, the then Head of Wipro’s Energy and sustainability Services business. Kumar was then posted as the VP of Emerging Market Solutions which aims at creating product engineering solutions for these markets. Kumar is said to have quit as he was not happy in this new role being a hardcore technology person with wide experience in telecom and embedded systems industry. 

Sources close to the development say that Kumar’s transfer to a newer role was part of the overall restructuring strategy which the company undertook at the beginning of this year. 

On being asked, Wipro confirmed the development. "Vijayakumar is moving on from Wipro to pursue his interests in technology innovation for the social sector. He has been associated with innovation and technology for social projects for sometime now and has decided to venture on his own. We wish him all the best for his future," a company spokesperson stated in an email response. 

Wipro, which underwent a restructuring after scrapping the joint CEO model in January this year, has seen the exits of few senior and top level executives in the recent past. Last year, the company said that its Head of BPO business Ashutosh Vaidya resigned from the company "to pursue interests outside of Wipro". 

Earlier this month, Laxman K Badiga, chief information officer (CIO) who was also the Head of Global Operations for the company took voluntary retirement from the company. One of the senior most employees who had spent nearly three decades at Wipro, Badiga later on joined Anthelio, a Dallas-headquartered IT solutions provider in healthcare space, as the chief operating officer (COO). 

In an interview to Business Standard earlier this month, T K Kurien, the CEO of Wipro’s IT Business had told that the company wanted a certain category of people to stay behind after the rationalisation. 

"Please remember that we had gone through a fairly deep rationalisation in jobs. So, does it create a sense of insecurity? The answer is absolutely yes. But I think, the bigger thing is if we go back and see the kind of people who have stayed back, we are quite happy," Kurien had said.