Bharti Airtel appoints Yahoo’s Anand Chandrasekaran as Chief Product Officer
Bharti Airtel from its barrio has roped in Yahoo’s senior director of global search products, Anand Chandrasekaran, to essay the role as its chief product officer, a newly created position at the nation’s largest telecom operator.
The latest hiring, in the midst of persistent executive departures at Bharti Airtel, underlines the company’s increased focus on data services.
Chandrasekaran will lead product conceptualisation, design and development across the consumer business segment of the company. At Yahoo, he led the fastest growing part of the search and commerce business unit for the Internet giant and was part of its search leadership team.
Confirming Chandrasekaran’s appointment, Bharti stated that he will report to consumer business head Srinivasan Gopalan. “Anand will be responsible for ensuring the best-in-class user interface and experience across all current and future product offerings around the Internet ecosystem,” a spokesperson held.
Several senior executives have left the company over the past one year after Gopal Vittal became its managing director and chief executive of India and South Asia operations.
Bharti Airtel is, in the interim, trying to rapidly grow data services as growth prospects of voice services are tapering off. As a chunk of this drive, the company has hired several new executives, including expats, in the past year.
Harmeen Mehta, who was the chief information officer and headed the global markets division at Spain’s largest bank BVVA, was brought in by Vittal as the CIO for Bharti Airtel and she is believed to have played a significant role in structuring the IBMBharti agreement announced last week. Govind Rajan joined the company from Unilever as chief marketing officer of consumer business and Srinivasan Gopalan quit Vodafone to become director of consumer business at Bharti Airtel.
In January, the company appointed Manish Prakash as director, enterprise & government, to head the overall strategy for the company’s business-to-business vertical in India.
Anand Chandrasekaran has led product development, mobile revenues, consumer internet, search, maps, local and big data across several Fortune 500 companies. He had also cofounded and assisted in building Aeroprise, a company credited with creating the most-deployed mobility product worldwide for service management.
Chandrasekaran has also served as a venture adviser at Storm Ventures, a $500 million venture capital firm.
