TCS, IBM veteran Natarajan Srinivasan to head Wipro's SAP unit

BENGALURU: India's third-largest software exporter Wipro has hired IBM and TCS veteran Natarajan Srinivasan as its global head of SAP, at a time when chief executive TK Kurien is looking to strengthen senior management ranks with top hires from rival firms.
Srinivasan will be based in Bengaluru and report to newly elevated president Bhanumurthy BM, at least two people familiar with the developments said, requesting anonymity.
Earlier this week, Wipro hired former TCS veteran Abid Ali Neemuchwala as its chief operating officer and undertook an organizational reshuffle that resulted in the elevation of company veterans GK Prasanna and Bhanumurthy BM to the rank of president and also a revamp of the executive council for its IT business.
"Wipro can confirm that Natarajan Srinivasan...joined Wipro in January this year as a vice president and global SAP practice head. He reports into Bhanumurthy BM, president and chief executive, application services and strategic alliances, Wipro," a company spokesperson said in an email.
The appointment of Srinivasan comes at a time when top outsourcing customers of Indian IT are increasingly opting for cloud-based, 'pay-per-use' billing models to avoid high upfront investments in buying and deploying software products from the likes of SAP AG and Oracle. As a result, the ERP businesses of traditional Indian IT companies are increasingly coming under pressure from newer entrants such as Salesforce.
Srinivasan "brings with him over 25 years of experience in various senior management positions in both mature and emerging markets. His past experience includes stints with IBM, TCS, Satyam Infoway and Aptech Consulting & Software. He is based in Bangalore," Wipro said in an email.
Separately, Wipro's global delivery head of infrastructure services Supriyo Sengupta has quit and joined Dell Services, according to the people mentioned above. A Wipro spokesperson confirmed the development.
Sengupta has joined Dell Services as vice president of infrastructure services delivery, a spokeswoman said.
This marks yet another instance of Dell's services business hiring Wipro executives under Suresh Vaswani, former joint CEO at the company.
Since he quit Wipro in 2011, Vaswani has hired more than half a dozen top executives from his former employer, including chief delivery and operations officer Ashutosh Vaidya, healthcare and life sciences head Sid Nair, banking and financial services head Sameer Kishore and global head of digital business services Raman Sapra.
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