Abid ali neemuchwala biography examples
Wipro CEO Abidali Neemuchwala to oversee new markets
This comes at a time when the company is planning to revamp its key Indiaand Middle Eastbusiness. Wipro has elevated executives including Manoj Nagpaul, who heads the company’s Asia Pacific and Japan business, to the executive committee, the company’s highest executive decision-making body, according to a senior executive. The company, which is struggling to regain growth momentum as it reported tepid first-quarter numbers on Tuesday and forecast more of the same, is aiming to generate more revenues from some of the new markets as part of its broader $15-bn revenue target.
New leaders inside the company such as former TCSexecutive Ankur Prakash, who heads emerging markets, and Nagpaul have been tasked to turn each of these units into billion dollar businesses over the next few years. All these leaders now report directly to Neemuchwala.
The Bengaluru-based company is in the process of strengthening its teams in each of the new markets.
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Why Abid Ali Neemuchwala faces a daunting task as Wipro's new COO
The caller was none other than TK Kurien, chief executive officer of Wipro, himself.
The purpose of the call could not be clearer — Kurien wanted to hire Neemuchwala for an important role within Wipro.
Yet, this came as a surprise, given Wipro’s penchant for mostly relying on internally-bred leaders for the senior-most positions over its seven-decade history. Wipro has rarely ever relied on outside talent for filling up vital, leadership cogs in its organisational machine.
Needless to say, Neemuchwala took the call. And over the next few weeks, Kurien made him an offer that he possibly could not refuse. Within the space of one month, Neemuchwala’s professional star has risen several notches — usually it takes several years for leaders in India’s IT services industry to make the jump from a vice-president to a chief operating officer.
Such a responsibility, also however, may prove to be a doubleedged sword. Neemuchwala now has the unenviable task of injecting some much-needed operational excellence at Wipro and dealing with internal complexities — and all this, under the watchful eyes of the company’s billionaire promoter, Azim Hashim Premji.
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Neemuchwala, who headed TCS’s back-office business and was one of the of the youngest executives to head a unit at Tata Consultancy Services, will need to bring all his skills and expertise into play if he is to pull off this Herculean task.
According to people who know Neemuchwala, he brings to the table certain skills that Wipro will need in spades — from client relationships, to process engineering expertise to automation experience.
But that does no
Wipro bids for As-a-Service… with Abid
One of the astutest CEO appointments in recent times was Abid Ali Neemuchwala (or simply “Abid” as most of us call him) being elevated to the hotseat at Wipro. I, personally, have known Abid since his TCS days, when the firm acquired Citigroup’s Indian banking operations in 2008, where Abid was instrumental in building a stellar BPO capability for the firm… and first interviewed him right here in 2010.
Cutting to the chase, Abid was the perfect hire at the perfect time for Wipro. With the Indian-heritage service providers scratching their heads trying to figure out how to keep growing, as those legacy $500m IT infrastructure deals and $200m SAP roll-outs dry up, the only true way forward is to build out an As-a-Service delivery model that caters for the modern enterprise needing to access talent, technology, analytics and automation capability as part of an integrated solution, tied much more to outcomes and efforts, than headcount numbers. Being able to manage the traditional enterprise’s needs, while investing in the emerging enterprise of the future, is the Holy Grail for the Indian-heritage majors seeking to get ahead of a market in transition.
In my view, today’s services providers need to be led by process people that understand technology and how to bring the two together effectively. If you’re just selling tech, you’ll end up with a commodity service, and if you’re just selling process, you’ll end up with something completely unscalable and unprofitable. So you need a CEO who gets right into the weeds of the operations and figures out how to technology-enable business services. You need someone who built a billion-dollar BPO business out of a tech-dominated service provider (TCS), where you had to train IT people to manage processes, and process people to understand how Avijit Roy, the 44-year old Bangladesh born, US-settled writer was hacked to death on February 26 in Dhaka. The blogger had consistently attacked the extremists and religious fanatics through his writings. His wife Rafida Ahmed Banya was critically injured in the attack. The couple was returning after visiting the book fair held on the eve of international Mother Tongue. He is the third writer to fall victim to religious extremists. Earlier Rajib Ahmed was killed in 2013. Even prior to that, Humayun Azad was brutally attacked by machete-wielding assailants in similar fashion while he was returning from a bookfair on February 27, 2014. Dr. Farzana Mohtashim, vice principal of the Anjuman PU College for Girls, Bhatkal has been nominated as member of the Syndicate of the Bijapur Women’s University. She is the first Muslim woman to be taken into the Syndicate of the said University. Farzana has earned a doctorate in Urdu literature. Her book titled, Shokhie Tahreer has been selected for the best written work in Urdu for the year 2012 by the Karnataka Urdu Academy. Muhammad Asghar Chulbul and Qazi Arshad Ali have been appointed the chairmen of the Kulbargi (formerly Gulbarga) Urban Development Authority and Bidar Urban Development Authority by the Karnataka Government. Chulbul is a protégé of Karnataka Minister Qamarul Islam and Qazi Arshad Ali was earlier Member of Legislative Council. He is also editor of Hindi daily Bidar ki Awaz. Nearly one-third of the Urban Development Authority posts, disproportionately larger than their share in the population, went to minorities leading to objection from several quarters within the Congress party. Abid Ali Neemuchwala, 48, who quit Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) in February was appointed Chief Operating Officer (COO) at Wipro in the second week of March. He had served the TCS, the largest IT company for 23 years and stewarded the transformation of the company’s business process outsourcing operation.