Persistent’s chief product officer, tech services head quit

Two senior executives of Pune-based IT services company Persistent Systems have quit after Christopher O’Connor took complete charge as chief executive in April, two people aware of the development told ET.

Nara Rajagopalan, chief product officer, and Sudhir Kulkarni, president, technology services, have resigned, the people said. Both quit in April, with Rajagopalan serving his notice period, said the one of the two persons.

O’Connor joined as CEOdesignate in February from IBM, where he led the IoT unit.


Persistent declined to comment for the story.

Rajagopalan, who had spent more than six years at Persistent, was the CEO of its digital technology services business Accelerite, a wholly-owned subsidiary. Kulkarni, who spent 11 years managing sales teams across the US, Europe and Asia, was spearheading technology services for the company until last month.

Rajagopalan was also heading the products segment for the company, which garners a significant chunk of its revenue from product engineering services.

He also acquired and ran products in endpoint security, disaster recovery and telecom location areas across Global 1000 customers. Rajagopalan incubated and launched Accelerite and “created the business model of acquiring under-valued non-strategic assets and building a growing digital transformation portfolio of products” in the fields of cloud, IoT, data analytics and endpoint security.

Persistent had on April 24 named Sandeep Kalra as president, technology services with effect from May 1. Kalra, who was general manager, digital transformation solutions, Harman International (a Samsung Company), was focusing on solutions across cloud computing, analytics and mobility for product companies at Harman.