–Brian Pereira
Mumbai, 22nd December 2015: The news about Jayantha Prabhu’s elevation from CTO to CIO was a welcome surprise for us, even as we enter the holiday season. And we are betting it is a great New Year gift to Mr. Prabhu too! I have known this soft-spoken, humble man for many years, and met him on several occasions. We once traveled together to the Essar Steel Plant at Hazira. So when the news reached us here at Digital Creed today, we were happy for “Jayantha” as he is fondly called. In fact, he is the recipient of the InformationWeek Global CIO Award — and I was proud to present this award to him, in the capacity of Editor-in-chief
Over the years I also interacted with his very able IT team at ESSAR and Aegis (Prasad Patil, Keyur Desai, Dharmesh Rathod and others). And I heard many great things about Jayantha’s leadership. Personally, I wished that he was my mentor.
Jayantha has a long innings at the Essar Group, since he joined in 1999. He has been responsible for both formulating and implementing Essar’s Information Technology roadmap. Under his leadership, Essar has emerged as an early adopter of IT for transforming business processes. Some of the IT milestones that Mr Prabhu has led include:
- The first corporate to start an Innovation & Business Transformation Cell, which focussed on generating ideas that drove business transformation through IT adoption
- Adoption and implementation of Cloud solutions straddling the spectrum of Private, Public and Hybrid, to make business processes more effective and efficient
- Adoption of various technology solutions across the Social, Mobility and Analytics landscape to meet business requirements, such as enhanced workforce agility and improved efficiency
- The first adopters of comprehensive organisation-wide unified collaboration and digital transformation resulting in communications cost optimization.
In his new role as Group CIO, he will be responsible for the Group IT strategy, enterprise architecture, information security, project delivery and Green IT & Sustainability amongst others.
A recipient of many awards like CIO 100, Top 10 CIO of India, Global CIO, CIO Power List, etc., Mr Prabhu has published several articles, case studies and technical papers in leading Indian and international journals. He has been invited by the Government of India, as well as prestigious institutions, like NASSCOM, as an expert on various panels.
I wish Jayantha the very best for his new role at the Group — and I am sure he will excel once again. The Group is known for its excellence in IT implementation, being an early adopter of virtualization, BI, analytics, cloud etc. And we wrote many case studies about this for InformationWeek magazine India.
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With inputs from the ESSAR PRESS RELEASE