MAM
Maxus India’s Kishan Kumar promoted as Maxus Vietnam MD
MUMBAI: Maxus Asia-Pacific regional CEO Ajit Varghese announced the joining of Kishan Kumar M S as Maxus Vietnam managing director.
He comes in from Maxus India’s Bangalore office and was also leading the Maxus Kerala and Hyderabad operations.
Kumar joins as replacement to Rose Huskey, who joined the Maxus APAC team as client leadership head for the region.
Maxus Vietnam GroupM CEO Jacob Kvist said, “The Vietnam media industry is evolving very rapidly and is turning into a market that attracts and develops the very best talent both locally and from overseas. This is once again evident both through Rose’s well deserved promotion to Maxus APAC client leader and the fact key talents such as Kishan see GroupM and Maxus Vietnam as the obvious next career step. I am very happy Kishan has decided to take on the challenge. His calm and friendly personality, senior leadership skills and established network within Maxus and GroupM organisations will allow him to hit the ground running. Rose and our entire Maxus team have done an outstanding job for our clients these last few years and I’m confident Kishan is exactly the sort of team player needed to take it to the next level.”
An alumnus of Mudra Institute of Communications Ahmedabad (MICA), Kumar has 12+ years of experience in strategic planning, business development, trading, new media and talent management.
In his various roles at Maxus India, he was instrumental in creating business-impacting work for clients like Titan Company, Britannia, Tata Global Beverages, Google India, Wipro Consumer Care etc. He has been a part of the Maxus India Management Committee since 2014; also a part of the GroupM Aspire training community since 2008.
His new role will allow him to work with GroupM Vietnam CEO Jacob Kvist and will be leading the digital transformation for clients in the market, bringing the power of GroupM capabilities in driving the change in thinking, media product and doing it in the most efficient & effective way.
Maxus increasingly is looking at driving ‘planning of consumer actions’ as its central vision by bring the voice of consumer central to its business and meshing together the data and content skills.
Commenting on his appointment, Kumar added, “Vietnam is a true reflection of today’s fast changing media & consumer landscape. GroupM has been pioneering change in Vietnam and I couldn’t have asked for a better opportunity to start this exciting new innings of my career. Maxus Vietnam has done remarkably well under Rose’s leadership and I look forward to consolidate further and help our clients succeed by leading them into change. While doing so, I’m equally looking forward to working with my wonderful colleagues at Maxus & GroupM Vietnam.”
Varghese said, “Kishan is an excellent candidate to lead this market as he has demonstrated in various previous roles in India. His people skills combined with great passion for building clients business and knowledge of media industry is something that will help us in the next phase of growth in Vietnam. Am happy that we are able to time and again give successful career options within the group for star performers and Kishan certainly meets that criteria.”
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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.
