Chairman of the $4.8 billion Wipro Group, Azim Premji, could well be going the Bill Gates way. After recent top-level changes, which were kicked off with the appointment of two joint CEOs and involved reclassifying some of the group's business units, Mr Premji now spends less time in the daily affairs of the group. Instead, he's spending more time with large clients, relationship building, in an academic role sharing business experiences at global universities and talking about green PCs and eco-sustainability.

Wipro now has a new person in charge of practically all its divisions including BPO, testing services, financial services, retail and transportation services, PC business, infotech business, consulting, manufacturing and healthcare. Wipro also has new heads for its European and US geographies besides a new global programme team which will look after large deals ($100 million plus). Also, telecom, media and communications is now a separate strategic business unit.

When asked about Mr Premji's new role, a senior Wipro executive said, "With two CEOs at the helm, Mr Premji is more hands off now and spends more time outside. He is engaging with large clients, taking global-speaking opportunities, relationship building and has cut down smaller roles." Mr Premji was unavailable for comments.

"The changes are an attempt to cut down layers within the management hierarchy and make it flatter. However, the challenge for IT services companies , which is now in a multi-billion dollar league, is that they still don't have global leadership," said Avinash Vashishta, CEO & MD, Tholons, an advisory firm.

Among the new roles for the top management team, T K Kurien, who was earlier heading BPO, is now looking after the newly-created global programmes team and consulting while Wipro BPO is now led by Ashutosh Vaidya. Soumitro Ghosh, who was earlier in the BFSI space, is global head of financial services. The European business is headed by Ayan Mukherji, who was earlier head of R&D outsourcing while Manoj Punja heads the North American operations.

Prior to this role, which he took over from P R Chandrashekar who quit Wipro, Mr Punja was heading the telecom, media, travel services division. Wipro Infotech is now headed by Anand Shankaran who took over this role from Suresh Vaswani, joint CEO, IT business and executive director Wipro.

On the restructuring, Girish Paranjpe, joint CEO and executive director Wipro said, "The management restructuring was driven by our board and chairman. We have also reclassified some of our business units and service lines in line with market and customer requirements.''

Mr Vaswani added, "Some of the key management structuring has been done to create a sharply focused global programs team which looks at creating, winning and executing large transformational programmes. We are focused on unleashing the strength of Wipro's product engineering capabilities by restructuring this as a service line addressing all verticals. We have also consolidated and created our consulting division."