MAM
Wavemaker bolsters leadership team with two new appointments
Mumbai: Wavemaker has announced the appointment of Shipra Roy as its new global chief people, inclusion and culture officer and Helen Price as global chief investment officer. Both will be based in London and join CEO Toby Jenner’s global leadership team, said the company.
Roy joins Wavemaker from a position as chief talent officer with McCann UK and Europe where her main responsibilities included setting the people strategy and working on key initiatives with a focus on DE&I, leadership development and succession planning. Previously, she worked at VMLY&R where she co-led the talent function globally with responsibility for EMEA, APAC, and key WPP global clients. In her new role, she will oversee all aspects of the people function in the organisation. She replaces James Edgar who left the agency in August.
Price joins Wavemaker from IPG Mediabrands where she was head of global accountability and investment. She has over 20 years of experience in the media industry with a focus on media trading and investment and has a strong track record in building and developing innovative media value solutions which balance client savings and commercial opportunities. At Wavemaker, her focus will be on creating value for clients and commercial opportunities for the agency. She replaces Keith Tiley who will be retiring at the end of the year.
In addition, Wavemaker has promoted global managing partner Simon Broderick to global head of investment.
“Even in the face of a global pandemic, Wavemaker has had an incredibly strong year and, as our growth journey continues, I’m pleased to welcome Helen and Shipra to the team,” said Toby Jenner. “They are both tremendous resources in their fields, and I look forward to working closely with them to help us deliver positively provoking, innovative, and commercially sound solutions for both our clients and our people.”
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.
