Nasscom announces new executive council

Wipro nominates CSO Rishad Premji to the new council

The National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom), the apex body of the Indian IT industry has announced a new 18-member executive council for the year 2013-15. According to Nasscom website, the election was done through an online voting process and received around 57 nomination.

The executive council has representation from almost all the major companies except India's third largest IT services company HCL Technologies. The new executive council which has been elected for two years include members like Arun Seth of Alcatel-Lucent India, Bhaskar Pramanik of Microsoft Corporation, Krishnakumar Natarajan of MindTree, Neelam Dhawan, Hewlett-Packard India.

The surprise induction to Nasscom's new executive council is Rishad Premji, chief strategy officer of Wipro's IT business and the son of Wipro's chairman Azim Premji. Rishad Premji has been nominated by the company in place of its CEO TK Kurien who was unable to attend a single meeting of the council last year, according to reports.

Incidentally, out of the 18 members of the executive council, majority of the representative companies are Indian and global IT and BPO services companies. The software product industry has not been represented in the new council.

Earlier this year, a group of software product companies had formed a think-tank called,   Indian Software Product Industry Round Table (iSPIRT)  to work for the development of a software product ecosystem in the country.