- Current role
- Chief Executive Officer
- Company
- Arclight Systems
- Experience
- 22 years
- Industry
- Technology
- Based
- Bengaluru
About
Rahul Menon became chief executive of Arclight Systems in August 2026, having run the company’s delivery organisation as chief operating officer for the four years before that. He is the first internal appointment to the role in Arclight’s eighteen-year history, and takes over a business of about 11,000 people with a services mix that has been shifting steadily towards platform revenue.
Menon joined Arclight in 2017 to run its banking and financial services vertical, then the company’s largest and slowest-growing unit. He restructured it around four delivery hubs and reduced the number of active client engagements by roughly a third, on the argument that Arclight was defending accounts that would never grow. Revenue in the vertical fell for two quarters and then recovered.
Before Arclight he spent eleven years at Kestrel Advisory, latterly as a partner in its technology practice, where he led operating-model work for Indian IT services firms navigating the shift to outcome-based contracts. He is an engineer by training and has said publicly that the hardest part of the transition to chief executive is learning to leave decisions unmade for longer than feels comfortable.
Leadership perspective
- What is the first thing you changed?
- The length of the operating review. It was four hours and it was theatre. It is ninety minutes now and people bring problems to it instead of conclusions.
- What does an internal successor get wrong most often?
- They keep running their old job for six months because they are good at it. I had to hand delivery away in the first fortnight, before I was ready, because the alternative was two people doing one job badly.
- Where is Indian IT services genuinely exposed?
- In the middle. The very large integrators have scale and the specialists have depth. Firms our size have to pick one, and most of us are still pretending we do not have to.