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Telecom Lead Team: Mallikarjun Rao, who resigned as chief technology officer at
Aircel India, is set to join Vodafone Netherlands.
Mallikarjun
Rao will be shifting to Europe in April, according to sources close to the
development. He left Aircel at a time when the Indian telecom operator is going
through a major management reshuffle. At Aircel, he was instrumental in the
recent roll out of 3G services and geographical expansion of mobile services.
Vodafone
Netherlands, a part of the Vodafone Group is the third largest mobile phone
company in the Netherlands, and was previously called Libertel.
He
was one of the core members of Aircel and built network function from 400 to
1100 technology people. He was instrumental in growing the business presence
from 8 geographies to 22 Geographies. Mallikarjun Rao spent around 4 years at
Aircel.
Before
Aircel, he was with Nortel Networks for 3 years and worked with wireless
equipment major Ericsson for 8 years.
He
has 17 years of work experience in telcommunications, with 4 years of executive
management role. Mallikarjun Rao’s specialties include: leading and building
teams in business development, cross functional management, cross cultural
teams in the wireless technology.
Recently,
Gurdeep Singh, chief operating officer of Aircel, has also stepped down from
the country’s fifth-largest telecom company with over 60 million customers.
Chief marketing officer Rahul Saighal is also in list of senior management
team.
In
late 2011, Aircel split its businesses into two functions – the operations
division, internally known as the Op-Co, and the networks division or ‘NetCo’.
The Op-Co, which handles the company’s Go-to-Markets strategy, branding and
markets expansion, is now headed by Pascal, while NetCo, which involves
managing Aircel’s active infrastructure, is headed by CFO, Sudhir Mathur,
according to a report in Economic Times.
