SMS GupShup Expands Leadership Team

Adds New Locations, Multiplies Reach; appoints Ravi Sundararajan as VP Marketing

BestMediaInfo Bureau | Delhi | September 30, 2011

SMS GupShup, announces the addition of two senior executives: Ravi Sundararajan as vice president of marketing, and Samir Parekh as vice president of human resources. The two bring four decades of marketing, sales and human resource experience, as well as expertise in product management and training. The company has met its goal to double headcount for 2011, with over one-hundred new employees company-wide. SMS GupShup has also opened five new offices across India in order to meet demand from its advertiser and user base.

SMS GupShup now has over 50 million users, outpacing both Twitter and Facebook in India. To meet the demands of its growing audience, GupShup has doubled its in-house staff this year, going from 100 employees in 2010 to 200 this year. The majority of SMS GupShup employees come from premium engineering and business institutes like IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) and IIM (Indian Institute of Management) and bring strong domain knowledge and experience.

As the company's new vice president of marketing, Ravi Sundararajan brings over twenty years of experience in product management, development, sales and marketing to his new position at SMS GupShup. Sundararajan has entrepreneurial and blue chip business experience across his previous roles as an executive at Symantec, CEO at Cloud Services Start up, GM at Akamai, VP at Palm and Engagement Manager at McKinsey and Company. Sundararajan, an engineer by trade, earned his M.B.A at Harvard University. He will lead the company's global marketing efforts including product, solution, channel and consumer marketing, branding, corporate communications and operations.  Sundararajan is routinely invited to speak at industry/ media events.

“GupShup is transforming India in ways only dreamed about before, and I'm excited to connect our social media innovations with businesses and consumers around the world,” said Sundararajan

Samir Parekh is a chartered accountant by trade and also ran his own mutual fund distribution company, which he sold. He then became a full time trainer at Kotak Life Insurance. He has been a HR consultant since then, serving several clients before joining GupShup. In his new role as vice president of HR, Parekh will be responsible for growing and retaining the ace team at SMS GupShup (what is the 'ace team'? pls add sentence to clarify).

Parekh looks forward to the possibilities for growth at SMS GupShup and said, “Great organizations are defined by great people. It's my job to find them.  As our user base grows, we must meet the demand with brilliant and passionate minds.”

SMS GupShup also announced the opening of seven new offices across India in order to meet demand from its advertiser and user base. SMS GupShup previously had five offices in India; the addition of seven new offices gives the company more equal distribution throughout all regions of India. The new locations are: Kochi, Hyderabad, Bhubaneswar, Ahmedabad, and Jaipur. The company already had offices in Delhi, Bangalore, Kolkata and Chennai, with headquarters in Mumbai.

“We have some of the best talent in the industry. Adding Ravi and Samir takes that to the next level and help us achieve our vision for everyone to be able to 'GupShup' – which means 'chit chat' in Hindi – on any mobile phone, even if they're hundreds or thousands of miles away from each other. With these new hires, 'GupShup' is well on the road to becoming as common a word in English as yoga or kama sutra,” says SMS GupShup co-founder and CEO Beerud Sheth.

Info@BestMediaInfo.com

Info@BestMediaInfo.com