TCS promotes Harrick Vin as CTO, revamps group structure under new CEO

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has appointed Harrick Vin as its new chief technology officer (CTO), replacing K Ananth Krishnan who will retire in October, the IT company announced in an exchange filing on 29 July.

Vin, a TCS fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE) and has been with the Tata Group company since July 2005, when he joined as a vice president and chief scientist. A distinguished Alumnus of IIT Bombay, Vin was earlier a professor of computer sciences at the University of Texas at Austin for 15 years. 

Prior to this role, Harrick headed TCS Digitate, a TCS venture that has partnered with Arrow to resell its ignio suite of AI-driven software for autonomous IT operations.

In his three-decades of experience, Vin has been involved in developing innovative solutions in a variety of areas in computing, and has authored more than 125 papers in leading international journals and conferences, as well as filed for 45 patents.

Krishnan joined TCS right after his M. Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi in 1988, and rose through the ranks to become the chief technology officer and an executive vice president responsible for research and innovation at the IT firm.

TCS further said in the exchange filing that it revamped its organisational structure by creating business groups based on industry sectors and geographies under the new chief executive officer and managing director, K. Krithivasan, who took charge on 1 June. These business groups such as banking, financial and insurance (BFSI), healthcare, retail and energy, would be led by senior executives appointed with effect from 1 August.

Based on an internal email sent by Krithivasan, Susheel Vasudevan will lead BFSI Americas, while Shankar NS will lead BFSI UK, Europe and Australia. The communication, media and information services will be headed by Akhilesh Tiwari, while life sciences, healthcare, energy, resources and utilities will be led by Debashis Ghosh.

Further, manufacturing will be under Anupam Singhal, Krishnan Ramanujam will spearhead retail, CPG, travel, transportation and hospitality and V. Rajanna will head technology, software and services, the company said.

The company has also promoted Abhinav Kumar as the global interim head for marketing. He was earlier focused only on the European market.

“Based on the discussions with customers and associates over the last couple of months, we believe, TCS can deliver the best value to the customers by synergising its domain and contextual knowledge across units. In this context, we have announced the new operating structure, which regroups our existing ISUs along industry segments into key Business groups,” TCS said in a statement.

“The above changes will help in deepening customer centricity, which is pivotal to our growth,” it added.

Some of the company’s new practices created by Krithivasan are focused on the enterprise cognitive business operations and artificial intelligence cloud to cope with the changing business environment.

The previous restructuring at TCS happened in April 2022 under former CEO and MD Rajesh Gopinathan In the earlier structure, who organised the company as per the size of the clients instead of verticals and geographies, which became a challenge for senior leaders and vertical heads.

On the deals front, despite a challenging environment, TCS bagged back-to-back mega deals of over $700 million in the UK, both through renewals and new clients.