Bengaluru : Wipro chief executive TK Kurien is set to make former marketing chief Rajan Kohli head the company’s next billion-dollar bet, its digital business, two people directly familiar with developments said.
A formal announcement on the structure of Wipro Digital and the appointment of company veteran Kohli, who currently heads Wipro’s banking and financial services business, is expected to be made sometime this week.
Earlier in March, Kurien had told analysts that Wipro would in the near-term create a separate unit to focus on the digital with new managers to head specific initiatives. This unit will exist within Wipro and not be a separate subsidiary, he had said.
Kurien himself is expected to personally spend significant time to make Wipro Digital one of the company’s top three service lines over the next 4-5 years, with Kohli overseeing the business on a dayto-day business.
“Kurien wanted someone who has a background in marketing, and Rajan’s experience in the area makes him suitable to head Digital, given that digital and marketing are sort of intertwined,” said one of the persons mentioned above, requesting anonymity.
Kohli’s expected elevation as head of Digital comes at a time when Wipro is undergoing a major organisational overhaul.
Last week, it appointed former TCS back-office head Abid Ali Neemuchwala as its chief operating officer, a move that frees up Kurien from daily operations and allows him to focus more on technology vision and broad strategy.
Wipro is still finalising structure of digital business and weighing options that include having separate digital teams for each vertical that will produce solutions and work on algorithms tailor-made to solve problems specific to a particular vertical, the people mentioned above said.
