Wipro elevates Rishad Premji to chief strategy officer
02 Sep 2010
The country's third largest software services exporterWipro Techologies, the $17-billion tech firm has named Harvard Business School MBA Rishad Premji, son of Wipro chairman Azim Premji as chief strategy officer of the information technology business.
Rishad Premji will assume responsibilities as the CSO of Wipro's $4.4-billion IT business from January 2011 and would be reporting to the joint CEOs of the IT business Girish Paranjpe and Suresh Vaswani.
Rishad, 33, is the older of the two sons of the company's founder and chairman, Azim Premji.
Rishad had joined Wipro in 2007 as a business manager is currently the general manager of treasury & investor relations.
He had worked briefly for General Electric as well as Bain Consulting in the UK. He did his MBA from the Harvard Business School and graduated from Wesleyan University, Connecticut.
This new post elevates him into Wipro's 32-strong management team and sets him up to be groomed to eventually succeed his father, although Azim Premji had always denied this in the past.
Wipro will move the current CSO, K R Lakshminarayana to Premji Trust as its chief endowment officer, where he would be managing investments from the corpus of the trust for the Azim Premji Foundation.
Premji's second son Tariq works at the Azim Premji Foundation.