Bhartiya Converge, the Global Capability Centre (GCC) enablement platform of Bhartiya Urban, has appointed Eric Pagdiwalla as its Chief Operating Officer. The Bengaluru-based company said the hire is aimed at strengthening its consulting, operations strategy and customer success functions as it scales an integrated GCC enablement model.
Who is Eric Pagdiwalla
Pagdiwalla arrives with more than 25 years of experience spanning GCCs, global business services, transformation, outsourcing, client management and operating-model design. He joins from Persistent Systems, where he was Senior Vice President and Head of GCC Practice.
Before that, he held leadership roles at ANSR as Managing Director – Client Success and Vice President – Service Delivery, and was Associate Vice President – Transformation at Ascena Retail Group. Earlier in his career, he spent more than 13 years at Hewlett Packard Enterprise across digital selling, marketing business services, global business services, process improvement, account management and outsourcing strategy.
In the new role, he will oversee consulting and operations strategy along with customer success, with a stated focus on sharpening execution and supporting the company’s next growth phase.
What the leadership said
Arjun Aggarwal, Vice Chairman & Managing Director, Bhartiya Urban, framed the services push as a logical extension of the group’s existing capabilities, noting that GCCs are evolving from traditional delivery centres into strategic hubs for technology, innovation, product development and business functions. He described the ambition as harnessing India’s talent, speed of execution and technology landscape alongside the group’s strengths in infrastructure and ecosystem development.
Sriram Chidambaram, Executive Director, Bhartiya – Services Platform and Chief Mentor, Bhartiya Converge, said Pagdiwalla’s mix of GCC expertise and transformation experience would help build a “differentiated, end-to-end GCC platform”.
Pagdiwalla himself said the conversation with client leadership teams begins with which capabilities can accelerate growth and where cost can be structurally removed — adding that it “starts as an advisory conversation before it becomes a delivery one”.
Why marketers should care
GCC appointments rarely make marketing headlines, but they should. India’s capability centre boom is quietly reshaping where global brand, media and martech work actually gets done. Increasingly, the teams running campaign operations, marketing automation, performance dashboards, creative production and customer data platforms for multinational brands sit inside Indian capability centres rather than at headquarters or in agency offices.
Pagdiwalla’s own CV illustrates the point: his HPE years included marketing business services and digital selling. That is precisely the kind of in-house, offshore marketing operations muscle that global enterprises have been building at scale.
For anyone working in or selling to this ecosystem, the implications are practical:
- Agencies: your client-side counterpart may now be a Bengaluru or Hyderabad capability centre lead, not a global CMO office. Pitch structures and scoping conversations need to reflect that.
- Martech vendors: GCCs are becoming meaningful buying and implementation centres for stack decisions, even when the licence is signed elsewhere.
- Talent: marketing ops, analytics and creative production roles inside GCCs are a fast-growing career track alongside agency and brand-side paths.
- Enablement players: the market is shifting from real estate plus staffing to advisory-plus-delivery bundles, where the provider is accountable for outcomes.
The bigger shift: advisory before delivery
The most useful signal in this announcement is the sequencing Pagdiwalla described — strategy first, delivery second, with accountability for both. It mirrors what has happened in marketing services more broadly, where consultancies moved into creative territory and agencies pushed upstream into business consulting.
Bhartiya Converge was set up to help global organisations establish, operate and scale GCCs in India, offering services across the GCC lifecycle — from setting up an India presence to building scalable capabilities in technology, innovation, transformation and business functions. Bundling strategy, talent, workspace and operations on a single platform is a bet that clients want fewer vendors and clearer ownership.
For marketing leaders watching the space, the takeaway is simple: as GCCs mature into strategic hubs, the line between an offshore delivery centre and a global centre of excellence keeps thinning. Knowing who runs those centres is becoming part of knowing your market.
Source: MediaNews4U
