Mr. Gopalan, a qualified Chartered Accountant holds an MBA from The Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, The Netherlands. Prior to joining the IT industry, he has worked with Procter and Gamble in Europe. At Cognizant, he heads the 200 strong Domain Consulting team in Retail and Hospitality and Manufacturing and Logistics verticals.

The IT sector is booming in India. India is being looked at not just as an off shoring destination but also as a source of high quality talent capable of delivering high end IT consulting services. Mr. Gopalan explained how MBAs can contribute towards business development and consulting services besides traditional IT practices of application development and maintenance. Further he went on to talk about the various other career opportunities that an MBA can look forward to in the IT sector. Some of the ones that he mentioned were Domain Consulting, Analyst relationship management and business development. He took examples of a few MBAs currently working Cognizant to illustrate the kinds of career paths that an MBA can look forward to.

The session began with Mr. Gopalan explaining the importance of soft skills that a B-school helps develop, to an MBA. He illustrated this using his personal experiences in the industry. The role of MBAs in the IT industry was exemplified by taking Cognizant as an example which targets a ratio of “1 MBA per 25 techies” across all of its verticals. With this he put to rest any misconceptions in the minds of the students, especially those with previous IT work experience, and made everyone realize that there is more to IT than meets the eye.

Having worked with P&G;, Mr. Gopalan drew parallels between the IT and FMCG industries. He explained how companies from both these industries aimed to go beyond merely providing solutions and commodities to their clients but instead, more value added services, products and brands.

This was followed by a stimulating Q&A; round where the. The session ended on a high note with Mr. Gopalan expressing his happiness over the great response and exhorting the students to consider career in IT as MBAs are the need of the hour in IT.