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Home > About Us > Our People
The mission of the key people at Tholons is to create a platform that bridges the gap in the current client-vendor model and to bring together the "Best-of-Breed" management consulting for globalization and a private equity based model of partnering.
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Chairman and CEO, Tholons |
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President,
Tholons Lifesciences |
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President, Tholons North America |
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President, Tholons SE Asia |
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His Beginnings: Avinash began his career in the telecommunications industry with AT&T/Lucent in Denver Colorado. He later lead several strategic outsourcing initiatives at Verizon and Nortel, where he served in various IT leadership capacities and ultimately lead the delivery and outsourcing operations in Europe, outsourcing to C&E Europe, Ireland, India, Vietnam, Russia and China. It was at AT&T, Lucent, and Nortel, that Avinash developed models for globalization and methodologies for the evaluation and management of global suppliers.
Building a Global Base: In 1996, Nortel Avinash expatriated to India for Nortel and executed a critical offshore outsourcing strategy. Within a couple years, as head of global outsourcing, he grew Nortel’s outsourced operations from a headcount of 250 to over 2000 outsourced resources. Led by Avinash, Nortel became India’s largest single customer. More importantly, his time in India allowed him to earn the respect of the Asian and Indian IT and BPO communities and build relationships ranging from CEO’s of India’s top 10 companies, to mid-level project managers. Nortel’s early adoption of India’s IT capabilities paved the way for companies like GE, Amex, IBM and others to outsource much larger operations to India based suppliers.
Services Globalization Prowess: As founder of neoIT and earlier with Nortel, Avinash has led sourcing engagements with Fortune 500 clients and market leaders such as: Nortel, P&G, Cardinal Health, Lucent, Bell South, AMP, Siemens, JP Morgan Chase, ABN Amro, Home Depot, Stanford University, Agilent, Sprint, Cendant, Towers Perrin, Visa and Hewitt and numerous IT and BPO Services providers and integrators including the large tier-one suppliers such as Accenture, Bearing Point, IBM, Infosys, TCS, Cap Gemini, WNS, Cognizant and Wipro. Avinash has helped several large US clients in their efforts to not just outsource back-office processes, application development, call center operations and knowledge processes to lower cost locations, but also evaluate acquisitions, JVs, BOTs and building their own operations.
Expertise: Avinash has dedicated his career to the unique requirements of the global outsourcing market. His background and understanding of the practices surrounding offshore markets provides clients with a custom offshoring strategy, supplier/build mapping, favorable pricing, reduced risk, successful transition and sustainable performance contracts that address issues unique to offshore delivery. He has evaluated and conducted due diligence on over 200 supplier firms, including companies in India, Russia, China, Philippines, Malaysia, C&E Europe, US, Canada, UK, Ireland and Vietnam. He has directed sourcing assessments, IT and BPO / KPO sourcing transactions and executed program governance models realizing $6 Billion in savings for clients. Avinash also developed significant expertise in the areas of R&D, Technology, Human Resources, Finance and Accounting, Analytics, Investment Research, claims processing and other domain specific voice and back office business processes. He has been a strong proponent of well-qualified, but lesser known tier-two suppliers in the competitive sourcing process.
Thought Leader: His opinions are sought and recognized by worldwide organizations and conference organizers such as IDC, NASSCOM, CITEM, C-Level, Private Equity Conference, the Indo-American Chamber of Commerce, CII, SBPOA and IAOP. Leading media conglomerates such as Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Time, The Straits Times, The Business Times, USA TODAY, CNN, CNBC, Forbes, Business Week, Bangkok Post, NDTV, Times Group, Business Standard and Cyber Media have featured Avinash extensively. He has been recognized by HRO Today as ‘HRO Superstar’ for 2006 and 2007 in the category of thought leaders and advisors on outsourcing. He has also been recognized as ‘FAO Superstar’ for 2007.
Realization of a Dream: Founded by Avinash in early 2006, Tholons brings together “Best-of-Breed” globalization advisory and private equity to help companies maximize their returns using an innovative risk-reward model. Tholons’ vision is to bring the missing ‘skin in the game’ / ‘equity participation’ to deliver significant ROI and equity leverage. There is considerable opportunity to benefit from this model and realize the true potential of ‘globalization’. The Tholons model has something to offer to everyone – clients, suppliers, investors and the global economy at large.
Tholons advisors and investment professionals have worked with leading Global 2000 firms in financial services, healthcare, retail, technology, telecommunications, utilities, oil and gas, consumer goods, logistics, retail, entertainment, manufacturing and other industry sectors.
The Offshore Nation authored by Avinash: Avinash has authored The Offshore Nation. This book is an essential read for global business leaders. The insights, lessons and practical advice within provide a timely look at the rapidly changing global economy, as outsourcing becomes a key component for global corporate success. Readers will come away with an understanding of how to leverage the strategic trends towards offshoring of IT and business processes, and will learn a best practices approach to the offshore lifecycle. From start to finish, this book demonstrates the significant benefits that globalization and offshoring generates. By discussing both strategic and tactical information, the book brings executives and their managers together as they look to go offshore for IT and business process services.
Education: Avinash holds an engineering degree from IIT Kanpur, an MS in Computer Science from University of Alberta and MBA from Arizona. He has over 20 years of experience in various aspects of business leadership, globalization, and equity management. |
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Experience: Dr. Garima is the president of life sciences at Tholons Inc. She serves our life sciences clients in the areas of developing and implementing globalization strategies and managing operations. Dr. Garima has more than 20 years of experience working in USA, UK, Canada and India in the field of Life Sciences and IT. Prior to founding Tholons, she co-founded neoIT, a leading offshore advisory firm. Dr. Garima worked as a senior research scientist and lecturer in bio-chemistry, bio-physics, and bio-genesis department at the University of Colorado and University of Alberta. Her work experience includes drug development for Thio Pharmaceuticals and Bristol-Myers Pharmaceutical.
Education: Dr. Garima has a number of publications in different International journals and is a Fellow of the Alberta Heritage Foundation for medical Research, Canada. |
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Experience: Atikem is the president of the North American Operations at Tholons. Inc. He brings in a wealth of experience advising clients on globalization of business processes, IT and investments. He currently serves as a Senior Advisor to Global Services Partners Acquisition Corp. Earlier he worked as a venture investment consultant for International Finance Corporation/World Bank's Global IT Investments Division, where he advised the International Finance Corporation on investments in the business process outsourcing sector and investment in the Asia-Pacific region. Since 2003, Mr. Haile-Mariam was the founding director of Glob-T, an international telecom and outsourcing consulting group. In 2001, he co-founded Ignis Inc., a telecom component manufacturer, and served as Vice President of Marketing and Business Development from its founding until it was acquired by Bookham Inc., a NASDAQ listed company. Previous to Ignis, Atikem was a member of the Intel Capital Corporation's investment organization and supervised company's investments in communications related entities. Earlier to Intel Capital, Atikem held several management positions within the communications group of Corning Inc.
Education: Atikem received a B.A. from Knox College, B.S. from Washington University in St. Louis and an M.B.A. from the Darden School at the University of Virginia. |
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Experience: B. Paul Santos is President for Tholons Southeast Asia (SEA) and is an accomplished entrepreneur. Prior to co-founding Tholons SEA, he founded Vertex Solutions, a Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) company that was granted Pioneer Status by the Philippine Board of Investments. He led the company's growth from a mere vision in 2001, to fundraising, to operation, then to a joint venture partnership with Alorica, Inc. in 2004, thus forming Alorica Philippines. Today, Alorica Philippines has close to 2,000 employees providing high-end technical and customer support services to global clients in consumer electronics, PC's, PC peripherals, telecommunications and healthcare.
Prior to Vertex/Alorica, Paul founded Indio Communications in 1997, just before the Asian market crisis. Despite the challenging economic environment, Paul led Indio's evolution from a small graphic design house to one of the Philippines' first and leading Customer Relationship Management (CRM) consulting companies. In 2004, he successfully sold majority of the company to Dentsu, one of the world's largest advertising agency networks. Today, Indio is being developed as Dentsu's CRM platform for Asia (excluding Japan).
Prior to Indio, Paul was a top-ranked Brand Manager at Procter & Gamble Philippines where he led his brand to record levels in revenue, share, image and profit.
Education: Paul obtained a B.S. in Management Engineering from the Ateneo de Manila University and a Joint Minor in International Management from the Ateneo and the University of Antwerp, Belgium.
General Information: Paul is also a member of the Entrepreneurs' Organization (EO). |
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Jo-An is a consultant with Tholons. In her past work, Jo-An has handled projects in various fields such as education, information technology, business process outsourcing, telecommunication and others. Her last major project involved managing a consolidated services platform implementation for a top telecommunications client of a solutions integrator company. Prior to this, she was involved in the identification, planning, and implementation of group-wide projects and/or potential shared-service projects for the Yuchengco Group of Companies. These projects include the review of various systems of the group including but not limited to its training procurement system, central procurement system, and the group's customer relationship management initiatives. She was also instrumental in the establishment of Mapua Information Technology Center, a business and skills accelerator school.
Jo-An obtained a B.S. in Management Engineering and an A.B. in Economic-Honors from the Ateneo de Manila University. She is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) with more than 6 years of experience in project management and a Certified Financial Consultant (CFC). She is also a part-time lecturer at the Ateneo de Manila University. |
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Vinu Kartha is a Principal at Tholons. He is part of the founding team of Tholons and is the lead consultant for developing sell side services.
Vinu has a decade of experience providing services globalization consulting to more than 75 global clients including many Global 500 clients in US and Europe. He also consults to leading service providers on their growth and expansion strategies, operations optimization and benchmarking and risk management strategies. His consulting experience spans the entire breadth of the outsourcing lifecycle, right from helping clients create globalization roadmaps, to the cost benefit analyses of various options, and global sourcing, shared services center set ups, evaluation of M&A opportunities and JVs. He has been the lead consultant on more than a dozen vendor assessments for M&A, vendor evaluation and partnerships and was instrumental in developing industry leading global sourcing processes especially the first industry standard vendor evaluation process, BOT models and developed many of the currently popular sourcing methodologies including offshore RFPs, vendor evaluation, portfolio analysis models, multi-vendor sourcing and risk management models.Prior to joining Tholons, he was a senior advisor at neoIT, where he was also part of the founding team.
Vinu has a Bachelor in Physics and a post graduate degree in MBA awarded by the Bharthiar University, India. |
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Akshay is a consultant with Tholons dealing with sourcing advisory for Tholons’ clients, and also works on various initiatives and studies. He has vast experience conducting financial modeling for various outsourcing and staff-takeover proposals. He has also helped create various dashboards to monitor and analyze financial and operational performance and to improve profitability. Akshay has also been instrumental in developing the strategy and implementation plan for building knowledge management systems, including creating process frameworks.
Prior to Tholons, Akshay worked with Tata Consultancy Services, where he led the Program Management Office for TCS’ relationship with a leading global investment bank. Earlier, as a member of TCS’ banking practice, he helped various retail, commercial and investment banks in their outsourcing initiatives. He was a key member of the advisory team helping a Middle East investment bank evaluate and select a product for its asset management business. He assisted in the creation of various offerings and handled pre-sales activities for the practice. Additionally, He helped conceptualize and set up an internal research desk to support various initiatives under the banking practice.
Akshay obtained his MBA from MDI, Gurgaon in 2004 and a B.E. from Delhi College of Engineering in 2002. He also attended the Norwegian School of Management in 2003 as an exchange student. |
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Jessica serves as the Director of Marketing and Public Relations for Tholons. She brings with her more than 10 years of experience in both the public and private sectors, working in areas such as IT, Banking/Finance, and Government. She has served as a consultant for world-class companies including Accenture, Booz Allen Hamilton, and Lockheed Martin.
Jessica has a MS in Linguistics from Georgetown University and a BA in Political Science from Mary Washington College.
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Over the past 20 years, Anand has extensive experience working in IT departments of top multi national companies managing, developing and implementing business critical applications including the associated outsourcing of those processes. In the 9 years with Morgan Stanley Investment Management, he has developed expertise in the financial service vertical and a deep knowledge of the technology in the financial services industry. He has managed a number of outsourced projects with IT vendors and also has considerable experience working in Morgan Stanley’s captive office in India in a leadership role.
Prior to joining Morgan Stanley, Anand was with KPMG Consulting, where he specialized in helping clients with application development and project management. He has experience working with large banks as a consultant (i.e. Abbey National in the UK and Standard Chartered in Hong Kong).
Anand received his post graduate degree in Systems Engineering and Management from I.I.T. Kharagpur and graduate degree in Electronics Engineering from University of Madras. |
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Ankur works as a consultant with Tholons Inc where he has been involved in advisory related to the sourcing of IT services, as well as analyzing the knowledge services industry and companies from an investment and advisory perspective. He has significant experience in solution architecting, transition modeling and cost estimation for large global sourcing contracts. Ankur also has been involved in internal business activities like capacity planning and pipeline management, which has helped him to gain insights into the internal business dynamics of global IT services suppliers. Additionally, he has undertaken the design and development of data warehousing reports for a Health Insurance major in US which provided him a significant exposure in the area of Business Intelligence.
Prior to joining Tholons, Ankur was a Global Sourcing Services Consultant at Atos Origin, where he was responsible for Business Development and Technology Consulting for clients in Europe. Prior to his MBA, Ankur worked with Cognizant Technology Solutions as a programmer analyst in the Health Insurance vertical for around two years. At Cognizant, Ankur was instrumental in developing a point solution for the Health Insurance industry in the area of Business Intelligence.
Ankur obtained a PGDM from IIM - Lucknow in 2006 and a BE Degree from VTU, Karnataka -2002. |
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Manuel is currently the Research Director at Tholons. Manuel leads the services globalization research advisory practice. He is responsible for research direction in emerging global locations, offshorable vertical and horizontal domains, people skills mapping, and data modeling for cost, margin and charge rates. Manuel has significant experience in research and consulting projects for the Philippine ICT market, with a focus on IT services. He has supervised multiple research initiatives as well as identified consulting projects. Manuel has also had experience as a project manager in the IT field and has translated this experience into a disciplined and pragmatic approach in undertaking the various research processes he is tasked to fulfill as a research consultant.
Manuel was previously the Research Manager for the IDC Philippines office. Further, Manuel led IDC Philippines’ research in the Software & Services and Enterprise Server markets in the country while being a regular contributor to the region's research and consulting activities covering online gaming.
He earned his M.A. (Information Sciences) from the Universidad de Navarra in Pamplona, Spain where he graduated with honors. |
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Marco is an accomplished entrepreneur and leader in the field of education, online gaming, data center management and BPO. His entrepreneurial experience includes setting up Edsamail - the largest free ISP in the Philippines, and Touchmedia Philippines - a leading bills payment, kiosk integrator. Prior to Tholons, he was COO of Mapua Information Technology Center, a leading IT school in the Philippines. Marco is also currently Vice-Chairman of Intellectual Property Ventures Group (IPVG), a publicly listed company in the Philippines Stock Exchange. He is also a director of IPeople, Inc., the education and IT holding company of the Yuchengco group of companies, also listed in the Philippine Stock Exchange.
Marco obtained a B.S. in Management Engineering from the Ateneo de Manila University. |
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Nishant is a Principal at Tholons Inc. He was part of the founding team at Tholons and has led consulting engagements for US and European clients for their globalization initiatives besides consulting with the sell side organizations for their location strategies. He has created investment models for target firm evaluation and leveraging globalization potential. Prior to joining Tholons, Nishant was a Senior Advisor at neoIT and has consulted with over 25 large clients on their services Globalization strategy and implementation. His consulting experience spans the breadth of the outsourcing lifecycle, right from helping clients create globalization roadmaps, to the cost benefit analyses of various options, and the implementation phases of sourcing, captive set ups, evaluation of M&A opportunities and JVs. He was instrumental in creating industry leading frameworks for Globalization strategy, portfolio assessment, and Financial Impact of globalization in the sourcing, captive and BOT models. Previously, Nishant worked as a project engineer with the LPG Projects department at HPCL (one of the largest Petroleum companies) where he managed LPG Bottling Plant Projects (valued around $36m).
He has a M.B.A. (Finance) from the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad and B.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur. |
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Ashwin is a consultant at Tholons Inc. He has extensive experience in the US, Europe, and India IT and BPO markets and has worked on more than 5 + large globalization deals with dollar impact of more than a billion US dollars. Ashwin has worked over the globalization lifecycle of strategy, sourcing, governance. He has also created insightful research on topics of importance for services globalization.
Ashwin has developed expertise in the areas of Portfolio Assessment, Supplier Selection and Data Privacy Audit. He has created a wealth of intellectual capital in the area of Data Privacy, Information Security and Regulations that affect offshoring and developed audit frameworks to evaluate supplier's compliance to US and European laws and regulations. Ashwin has also worked on private equity engagements with significant experience in Deal Sourcing, Deal Evaluation and Financial Modeling.
Ashwin has been a key contributor on a number of engagements with leading clients that have spanned the services globalization lifecycle. He has participated on client teams for The Home Depot, Electronic Arts, Cardinal Health, Stanford University, Mercury and Option One among others. He has been responsible for developing Tholons intellectual capital for the Supplier Due Diligence and regulatory environment affecting globalization of services, information security and data privacy and knowledge transfer and management. Ashwin has also been a key contributor in private equity engagements involving IT and Business Services firms.
Ashwin is a graduate of IIT Bombay with a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science & Engineering and a Master's degree in Management.
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Allen leads M&A and Investment evaluation efforts for Tholons Capital in North America. He has significant US deal experience having worked in Healthcare, Insurance, IT Services and Utilities sectors. Allen brings in management, operational and consulting experience to support deal sourcing, due diligence, operational excellence and business transformation. He is the lead advisor for services globalization fund investments in US.
Prior to joining Tholons his career experience has been with both publicly held and early stage companies that offer mission critical enterprise applications or business process outsourcing services with companies such as Computer Sciences Corporation, McKesson Corporation, Quality Care Solutions, Inc and Global Innovative Concepts.
Allen is a native of Alabama and holds a B.A. from Auburn University. He is on the advisory committee for The Foundry rescue mission and is actively involved in civic and community organizations that include Athletes in Action, Habitat for Humanity and Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Allen his spouse Virginia and three daughters reside in Birmingham, Alabama. |
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The Offshore Nation:
Strategies for Success in Global Outsourcing and Offshoring
Co-author:
Avinash Vashistha |
The book presents a strategic and practitioner's perspective into the globalization of services and the role it plays in shaping the global economy's future.
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Buy This Book
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The trend of business process outsourcing (BPO) is strong in the West and has now started to spread among small and medium enterprises (SMEs), who are usually laggards in adopting such innovations. The focus of this research is on the process of diffusion and adoption of BPO as a new idea within the SME companies. The four factors are: innovation profile or the characteristics that favour the adoption of an innovation; innovator profile; environmental characteristics; and system characteristics.
• Read More
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Offshoring and specifically Globalization is maturing. The new emerging trend is for countries to adopt a strategy wherein they become a "Center of Excellence" in a selected service area. In this article, we examine this globalization trend and explore the impact it will have on service providers, buyers, governments and the global economy as a whole.
• Read More
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If you believe your profile matches our requirements and you want to work in a challenging environment that requires your intellect, intuition, interest and inspiration, please send your latest resume to careers@tholons.com. Enter the position applied for in the subject line.
• Apply Now
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