CHENNAI: Tiger Analytics has just signalled how serious it is about growing up. The AI and analytics consultancy has appointed Prakash Arunachalam as its global head of operations, a role carrying the weight of a chief operating officer, and the timing is no accident. A company eyeing an IPO needs someone who can turn a fast-scaling professional services shop into a disciplined machine, and that is precisely the job Arunachalam has been handed.
His brief is broad: sharpen operational efficiency, build agility into the business, and shore up profitability as Tiger pushes into what it calls its next chapter as a full-stack AI company. That is corporate speak for a simple truth. Consultancies live and die by margins and delivery discipline, and Tiger, which has grown into a 7,000-plus strong global outfit spanning the US, Canada, Britain, India, Singapore and Australia, needs an operator who has actually run large, complex organisations before, not just advised them.
Arunachalam fits that bill comfortably. He arrives from Servion, where he served as president and chief operating officer and sat on the board, steering the company through growth, transformation and acquisitions involving two private equity partners, hardly a gentle finishing school. Before that, stints at Virtusa and Polaris saw him running large profit and loss books, building hyperscaler partnerships, leading sales organisations and overseeing large-scale delivery, including a role in the acquisition and integration of the two firms. His experience spans digital customer experience, automation, data and AI, with particular depth in banking, financial services and insurance, a sector where Tiger already has a strong footprint.
Pradeep Gulipalli, co-founder of Tiger Analytics, was blunt about why the hire matters, pointing to Arunachalam’s record of scaling operations through high-performing global teams and running large P&Ls across both India-listed and US-listed companies as central to what the firm wants to build next. That last detail, experience straddling both Indian and American listed environments, is a tell. It suggests Tiger’s leadership is thinking hard about where and how a future listing might happen, and wants operational leadership that has already lived through that kind of scrutiny.
Arunachalam himself did not bury the lede. He spoke of wanting to scale operations, drive growth, shape the M&A journey and help prepare the company for a potential IPO in the years ahead, a remarkably candid roadmap for a fresh appointment. Fifteen years into its existence, Tiger Analytics has built a reputation solving gnarly problems for Fortune 1000 clients across retail, banking, insurance, manufacturing and healthcare. Hiring an operator with this specific mix of scale, P&L ownership and public-market exposure suggests the company is done playing it as a scrappy consultancy and is now building the institutional plumbing a listed company needs.