DQ Top 20: Instability at the Top

Dataquest has been coming out with its much-awaited Top 20 list for decades now. What started as the Top 10 in the early 1980s (there were so few prominent Indian IT companies in those days) became the Top 20 staple.

Initially DQ was the only place where you could know about the top Indian IT companies by revenue. That’s difficult to imagine in today’s Social Media Age where such information flits around at breakneck speed across news sites and WhatsApp forwards.

One thing noticeable in the Top 20 list of 2023 is the sheer number of leadership changes that have taken place in India’s premier companies in the last 1-2 odd years. In fact, in that period, 6/20 companies have seen a leadership change.

At No. 1 is the staple leader TCS. Rajesh Gopinath was at the helm from 2017, but his replacement is K. Krithivasan. At No. 6 is Tech Mahindra. CP Gurnani took over at Tech Mahindra in 2009 and his stint comes to an end at the end of the year. His replacement is Mohit Joshi.

At No. 7 is Accenture and here too Rekha Menon has stepped down paving way for a joint responsibility between Sandeep Dutta and Ajay Vij. At No. 14 is HP India and Ketan Patel has been elevated to a global role while Gurpreet Brar is the interim chief. At No. 16 is Microsoft and Anant Maheshwari gives way to Puneet Chandok. Chandok was at the helm of AWS India which is at No. 18, where Vaishali Kasture will be an interim leader.

That’s quite a lot of instability and companies don’t like it that way looking at long stints. Just look at Microsoft in the US. The company has had just 3 CEOs since it was founded in 1975 (close to 50 years now!)

1. Bill Gates (1975–2000).

2. Steve Ballmer (2000–2014).

3. Satya Nadella (2014–now).

For the record, here are the other leaders of the DQ Top 20 2023 list…

No. 2, Infosys–Salil Parekh. No. 3, HCLTech–C Vijayakumar. No. 4, Wipro, Thierry Delaporte. No. 5, Redington–Rajiv Srivastava. No. 8, Cognizant–Ravi Kumar S. No. 9, Ingram Micro–Navneet Singh Bindra. No. 10, LTIMindtree–Debashis Chatterjee.

No. 11, IBM–Sandip Patel. No. 12, Capgemini–Ashwin Yardi. No. 13, Dell Technologies–Alok Ohrie. No. 15, Mphasis–Nitin Rakesh. No. 17, Oracle–Shailender Kumar. No. 19, Genpact–Tiger Tyagarajan. No. 20, Google–Sanjay Gupta.