It was in 2006 that he co-founded Protiviti. In his current role, he is focused on continuing the growth trends and maintaining the company’s leadership position in the areas of operational and risk consulting for the telecom industry, and IT consulting. According to Gupta, the Indian telecom industry has gone through many phases of evolution. “The voice segment has now stabilised and matured to a large extent,” he comments. “The industry is going to see more of data play and increased deployment of 3G and long term evolution, m-commerce, triple play, mobile gaming and value-added content.”

He suggests that the key differentiator for operators would be in achieving the optimal mix of good value-added services, data services and voice, which such companies can provide to their subscribers, keeping in mind their average wallet size.

For Gupta, picking up one or two memorable assignments is a tough task. He feels that over the years there have been several assignments that have been memorable in different ways – from the degree of client demands to complexity, scale, etc. However, he identifies a large revenue assurance project that Protiviti did for a telecom player with operations in the Middle East and Africa as particularly challenging. “The engagement had its challenges in terms of the varied local culture in Africa. We were able to demonstrate significant value savings to the organisation in terms of revenue leakage and revenue enhancement. We also had to interact with the end network vendors to ensure that the issues were plugged at the ground level itself.”

Gupta attributes his success to being innovative in developing solutions for clients that are practical to implement, and providing customers tangible benefits. As a manager, he believes in giving a free hand to his team to usher in innovation and promote ownership with regard to the task at hand. He terms himself as goal-oriented and gives enough space to his team to achieve the goals by innovating within the methodology or the protocols set up by the organisation.