MAM
Lowe snatches Bajaj Discover creative duties from O&M
MUMBAI: It is celebration time at the Lowe stable as yet another Bajaj account lands in Lowe’s Kitty. Bajaj Discover, which was being handled by O&M, has just moved to Lowe. In effect, now Lowe handles 3 of the 4 Bajaj bike brands – CT 100, Avenger and Discover.
Bajaj Auto GM marketing KS Grahapati confirmed the same to Indiantelevision.com, stating that the account moved last week, although he did not divulge any details on the reason for the shift.
Lowe’s senior vice-president Tarun Chauhan confirmed the development as well.
Flashing back to the close of 2004, Bajaj saw it consolidate its bike accounts with Leo Burnett bagging Pulsar, Lowe taking Bajaj CT 100 and Avenger and O&M bagging Bajaj Discover.
O&M in 2004 had roped in Jackie Chan for the launch commercial of Bajaj Discover. The bike, which was launched in the first week of October 2004, was priced at Rs 39,997.
The two wheeler category has primarily three segments – Premium / sport, commuter/economy and the aggregative segment.
While Pulsar straddles the premium segment, CT 100 is in the economy lane. In the aggregative segment, Bajaj earlier had Wind and Calibre, both of which were phased out to be replaced by Discover.
The Discover brand is being re-launched and the campaign will hit the tube in third week of August.
Brands
Naveen Kokkanti promoted to director – devOps at Nasdaq
Tech leader steps up to steer innovation and modernise systems
BENGALURU: Naveen Kokkanti has been elevated to director – devOps at Nasdaq, marking a defining moment in his 14 year journey through the fast evolving world of digital transformation.
Based in Bengaluru, Kokkanti moves into the role after a short but impactful stint as lead devOps engineer at the global exchange operator. In his new position, he will focus on driving innovation, sharpening operational efficiency and reinforcing the organisation’s technology backbone.
For Kokkanti, the promotion reflects more than a change in title. It crowns over a decade of building, migrating and modernising enterprise systems across some of the biggest names in technology and consulting.
Before joining Nasdaq in 2025, he spent four years at Deloitte Consulting as senior consultant, where he worked extensively on large scale cloud and data transformations. His work ranged from migrating legacy data applications to AWS and implementing unity catalog governance frameworks, to designing multi cloud Databricks lakehouse strategies. He was also part of Deloitte’s Databricks alliance core team, contributing to go to market initiatives and publishing technical whitepapers on migration and architecture best practices.
Earlier roles at Virtusa and Infosys saw him lead cloud migrations, design secure infrastructure environments and manage enterprise grade AWS ecosystems. At Infosys, he led a team of engineers while overseeing everything from VPC architecture and IAM policies to disaster recovery, security hardening and cost optimisation.
His career began with hands on infrastructure and support roles at Micro Focus, Cerner Corporation and Dell Technologies, where he developed a strong foundation in systems engineering, virtualisation and enterprise IT operations.
Across roles, a consistent theme emerges. Kokkanti thrives at the intersection of cloud, data and governance. From Terraform and AWS to Databricks and enterprise devOps frameworks, his skillset reflects the growing demand for leaders who can translate complex infrastructure into scalable, secure and business ready platforms.
At Nasdaq, that blend of technical depth and leadership experience is set to play a key role as the organisation continues to evolve its global technology infrastructure. For Kokkanti, the promotion is not just about moving up. It is about building forward.
