BS People: Pavan Vaish

Founder's farewell

Employees at IBM Business Process Services in India — better known as IBM Daksh — are still coming to terms with the news that Chief Executive Pavan Vaish has decided to leave the company. Vaish announced his intention to quit and pursue other interests on December 16. Vaish’s announcement comes at a time when IBM has rebranded its business process outsourcing (BPO) business under the umbrella of IBM Business Process Services.

Vaish and Sanjeev Aggarwal were the co-founders of Daksh eServices in 2000. The Indian BPO industry that we know it today was started by early movers like Spectramind and Daksh. Before that, large multinationals like GE, British Airways and others had their captive units in India. While Spectramind was acquired by Wipro in 2002, IBM acquired Daksh in 2004. For IBM, this has been one of its most successful acquisitions and marked its entry into the BPO segment.

Vaish took over as CEO of IBM Daksh in 2006, after Aggawal quit and started Helion Venture Partners, a venture investment firm. Vaish was responsible for providing strategic guidance and leadership to all client-facing business units and shared services. When IBM acquired Daksh, it had a 6,000-employee base with $60 million in revenues. Since then, IBM Daksh has grown in size and strength. At present, it has an employee base of 30,000 and revenues of about $750 million.

Vaish has been instrumental in the rapid transformation of the start-up into the global market leader that IBM Daksh is today. Vaish also played a key role in the successful integration of Daksh into the globally-integrated enterprise model of IBM, enabling it to attain scalability within a short period of time.

Prior to co-founding Daksh, Vaish was founder member of Quadrant Infotech, an offshore data capturing business focused on the US market. He is an alumnus of the Indian Institute Technology, Kharagpur, and holds a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Stanford University. Vaish has also graduated the advanced management programme of Harvard Business School.