MAM
GroupM India restructures Central Trading Group leadership
Mumbai: GroupM India has restructured its media buying function – Central Trading Group (CTG) and announced four key appointments to the leadership team.
Pratik Rathod who has been successfully leading buying for Wavemaker will be taking on an elevated group-level role of GroupM India national broadcast head. “Rathod’s expertise, vast experience and approach to creative solutions will help us further leverage one of the largest mediums. He will help strengthen GroupM’s OneVoice priorities and strengthen media partnerships,” said the company in a statement on Monday.
K Srinivas Rao takes over the Wavemaker buying mandate from Pratik Rathod. Rao has been leading the Mediacom buying function for the past few years. For MediaCom, he has built a strong integrated buying team and strengthened the overall buying products by adopting strong processes.
Rahul Satoskar, currently the region buying lead for Mindshare west, gets elevated to lead Mediacom buying nationally.
Muralidhar T is taking on an elevated role of leading buying function for the whole of Mindshare. Over the years, Muralidhar has done a commendable job and his contribution has led Mindshare buying scale-up to new heights. “Murali’s strategic thinking and astute commercial acumen would help the overall agency further enhance the buying product and enable higher value to unlock for the clients,” said the statement.
“This restructure is a part of evolving transformation for GroupM,” stated GroupM India president of investments and pricing Sidharth Parashar. “The relentless commitment to delivering value to its client’s business is what truly defines team CTG, and I am privileged to lead a multi-dimensional team of leaders who are passionate about media and our client’s business. I am delighted to see these leaders grow and take on larger responsibilities in shaping the GroupM CTG transformational journey.”
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.
