After years of dedicated service, TK Kurien will exit the multinational IT corporation, Wipro, before the end of this financial year. TK has served the firm for almost two decades, withholding the post of CEO for five years. Presently, he is appointed as the Vice Chairman of the company, with responsibilities handed over to the latter, the previous year only.
The $7.5 billion IT firm will be announcing the news post declaration of company’s third quarter results. Moreover, TK will also vacant its seat as a member of the board with his exit from Wipro. Though there has no comment upon his future endeavors, it seems he relies on the investments made by him in the past.
Kurien is considered as one of the most significant human asset for Wipro particular to its revenue growth. Apart from it, Kurien introduced the company with trends in IT world, restructuring the long followed patterns and operations. Some of these trends included Cloud mobile services, artificial intelligence space, automation, cybersecurity etc.
Appreciating the efforts of the latter, Peter-Bendor Samuel, CEO of outsourcing research firm Everest Group said,
One of the big challenges which TK inherited was that the other industry leaders had already made the changes to focus on industry, and TK was constantly playing catch up, having lost the first mover advantage that TCS and Cognizant gained. His focus on moving quickly, and impatience to catch up created a backlash in the Wipro culture which he had to constantly deal with.
Speaking of personal finances from TK, he invested in few AI startups keeping in mind the future growth of the said sector. He also invested in mobile payments startup ToneTag with the escalation in digitization and increased awareness relative to mobile solutions. Kurien was to exit the company last year only but due to the delineated decision from the Board, TK had to stay. As the CEO for Wipro, Kurien has covered seven million air miles besides living out of a suitcase for 220 days a year.
With Kurien taking over as CEO more than six years ago, Wipro witnessed an extensive growth in its clients with a 9x increase till 2015-16. Moreover, major deals including $400 million contract with Japanese pharmaceutical major Takeda, Bank of America IT vendor league and enhancement of cognitive solutions platform Holmes were finalized under his supervision. Though there is much to credit to Kurien, the company failed to catch up with Infosys, the big-time rival for Wipro.
Kurien not only strengthened the position of Wipro in banking and financial services but also bought GE-approach to operational efficiency. Commenting upon the operational efficiency bought by TK, Jessie Paul, founder of marketing advisory firm Paul Writer said,
In some instances, people operated on exception and not by policy. Kurien was cut and dried in saying that exception to the policy cannot sustain long term and it stemmed inefficiency and increased costs.
