Capgemini names Igate HR head Srinivas Kandula as India CEO

Capgemini appointed former Igate HR head Srinivas Kandula as its new chief executive officer, has also conducted an organization-wide reshuffle and moved several top Igate executives into different management roles within the France-based technology services and consulting company.

Nearly nine months after Capgemini agreed to buy Fremont, California-based Igate for $4 billion, the French IT giant has also restructured and merged several of Igate's verticals with its own business lines, as part of the broader integration process that is expected to be completed by the middle of 2016.

In his first interview after taking over as CEO, Kandula told  that his focus will be to drive transformation in the area of execution, by automating key people as well as delivery processes.

"If you look at one of the key reasons for attrition, it because people are not excited about monotonous tasks. They want to move up, do something where they are intellectuality leveraged. So if you automate some of these tasks, employees will be happy and clients will also be happy since the difference in delivery will be reduced. So our mission will be to automate repetitive process," he said.

Kandula, who takes over from Aruna Jayanthi who is now global BPO head of the company said that as far as service line focus areas are concerned, the company will continue to strengthen its traditional business such as IMS, testing, enterprise solutions, application testing and maintenance while increasing focus on cloud, digital and new service areas. "I cant focus on just one area while diluting focus on another area," he added.

As part of the organizational rejig, former iGate CFO Sujit Sircar has also moved to a new role and has moved into an operational role at one of Capgemini's North America business units, Kandula said. Srikanth Iyengar, who used to head Europe and APAC at Igate, has taken over as global sales officer.

Igate's banking and financial services and insurance businesses have also been merged with Capgemini's global financial services unit, while other verticals such as manufacturing and consumer products and goods has been integrated into Capgemini's North America Application Services business.

"What we have done is — Igate's banking and financial services and insurance used to be distinct verticals. Those two have been merged with what we call in Capgemini as Financial Services Global Business unit.

We've merged our BFS and Insurance with that and what Capgemini has is called North America Application Services (NAAS)," said Kandula, Current Capgemini India executives have also taken up larger roles — for instance, Capgemini India's marketing chief Seema Trivedi is also now overseeing what used to be iGate's marketing and communications unit.

BL Narayan, who heads HR at Capgemini India, has taken over Igate's HR function. "And all our other businesses like manufacturing, CPG, GE business unit have been merged with NAAS. Our product and engineering solutions is merged with the hi-tech business of Capgemini," said Kandula.

Kandula said Capgemini India would hire extensively in India and its headcount would touch 100,000 by the end of 2016.