TCS has many new faces. Know them all

Deemed to be the most stable management in the Indian IT sector, Tata Consultancy Service with a sudden shuffle in its top management is showing traits of its Bengaluru based rivals Wipro and Infosys. While the latter have been thundered with resignations and shuffles in last few months, TCS was a way better until its head of business process services Abid Ali Neemuchwala moved to Wipro.

As per a news report by The Economic Times, Vish Iyer, who was the company's president " Asia Pacific, was replaced by Girish Ramachandran in Janauary. Iyer is now global head for legal and corporate affairs, TCS' investor relations page shows.

J Rajagopal, executive vice president and global head for consulting, stepped down from the role December, his profile on professional social networking site Linkedin shows, confirmed the financial daily. The responsibility for consulting was moved to Krishnan Ramanujam who is also the global head for enterprise solutions. Rajagopal is now an advisor at TCS. In March, TCS also appointed Aarthi Subramanian, its global head of delivery excellence, to its board.

The news report by the financial daily reads, part of the reason for the moves is also a result of a problem that the Indian IT industry is just beginning to face. In the past, high-performing talent could always be given better roles as the industry was expanding into new service lines and geographies. But as the industry has grown and matured, new areas to expand into have grown scarce.

"With the CEO being quite a long way from retirement you have leaders of similar age moving on to CEO/COO roles as they will never gthe chance at TCS. Abid is one such person. They are also moving aside people to allow up-&-comers space to lead and grow," Peter Bendor-Samuel, CEO at IT outsourcing consultancy, Everest told the ET.

Analysts say that though growth at TCS has slowed over the past few quarters, the management changes are unlikely to be a reflection of that.

"I wouldn't ascribe the changes to the quarterly results. TCS has been one of the fastest growing companies in the Indian IT sector. I would say it is the normal process in the company," Thomas Reuner, managing director of IT outsourcing research at consulting firm HfS Research told the ET.

That is something TCS' Chandra has also said in an interview in April with the ET. "All of our units are run by very strong leaders," Chandra said. "So to be very frank, if you can take away one message, it's that our execution is solid. We have never had an execution issue. So, we are not going to rejig the structure for execution."