Avinash Vashistha Lefts Accenture India

Consulting and outsourcing company Accenture has confirmed the resignation of chairman and managing director Avinash Vashistha and said it will soon announce his replacement.

ET had reported that Vashistha had put in his papers and would serve his term till August end. “We can confirm to you that Avinash Vashistha has decided to resign from Accenture to pursue entrepreneurial and corporate leadership opportunities leveraging new technologies, effective August 21, 2015,” a spokesperson for Accenture said in an email reply to ET’s query on Thursday.

In an email to its India employees a day earlier, Accenture had announced Vashistha’s exit and said the company is working on a succession plan to identify and name new leadership. Vashistha is a veteran of India’s outsourcing industry who founded an outsourcing advisory firm called neoIT in 1999 before joining Accenture as its India MD in January 2011.

At neoIT, Vashistha boasted of a client list that included Siemens, JP Morgan Chase, ABN Amro, Home Depot and Stanford University. Vashistha’s exit from Accenture comes at a time when the company is looking to gain market share in India from international rivals such as IBM, which is among the most dominant technology vendors in the country and boasts of marquee telecom clients such as Bharti Airtel and Vodafone.

When Vashistha joined Accenture, the company was widely seen as a late entrant in India’s around $20-billion information technology market.