Neelam Dhawan: The Elegant Tech Giant

Neelam Dhawan is as confident as she looks. Typically draped in a saree, she carries herself with elegance and confidence in equal proportion. She is undoubtedly one of the already-established women leaders in India Inc, ever green and still going strong.

Neelam is currently the Vice President and General Manager, HP Enterprise (HPE) Group and Country Managing Director of Hewlett-Packard India. She has countrywide responsibility for revenues and profitability and ensuring the greatest leverage from HP’s services, personal systems and imaging & printing businesses. Effective 1 November, 2016 Neelam has taken a regional leadership role at the APJ (Asia-Pacific & Japan) level to lead the Global Industries, Strategic Alliances & Inside Sales for HPE Asia Pacific and Japan.

With a portfolio that extends to offshore activities, BPO, software engineering, research and IT services, Neelam is focused on shaping the company’s overall business agenda and leading its strategy and corporate development efforts to make HP the most admired company in India.

Previously, Neelam was the Managing Director of Microsoft India, a position she held from 2005 to 2008. During her tenure, she sharpened Microsoft’s strategic focus and improved its operating efficiency and execution, as well as its financial performance and customer focus.

Prior to this assignment, Neelam held a variety of successful leadership positions in leading Indian IT companies, including HCL and IBM. Neelam holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics from St. Stephen’s College, New Delhi, and a Masters in Business Administration from the Faculty of Management Studies, Delhi University. Straight after her MBA in 1983, she joined her first company HCL. Hindustan Unilever and Asian Paints reportedly did not hire her because they thought women were not suitable for market-facing roles.

Over the years, HPE has transformed from a PC maker to an IT solutions company. Last year, HPE announced their outlook for fiscal year 2017 which highlighted important financial that included anticipating an operating company net cash balance of approximately $8 billion ending FY17 and the expectation of normalised free cash flow for the future HPE to be $2.1-$2.4 billion.

Neelam has demonstrated leadership right from the beginning of her career that spans 3 decades. For instance, in 1986, she helped HCL launch the first affordable PC called the BusyBee. In the 1990s, distribution channels weren’t the order of the day, Neelam (with IBM then) set up India’s first channel network for Tier-II towns to sell IBM machines.

Later in 1999, she joined HP. By then, the services industry was booming and she saw the opportunity early on and got HP its first two outsourcing contracts in 2003. In 2005, she joined Microsoft India as its Managing Director until in 2008 when she returned to HP to lead its India business. Given the decline in PC shipments across the world, including in Asia Pacific and India since 2012, HPE is focussing on high-growth segments like gaming to offset the decline in overall PC sales. To cater to the niche, in February this year, HP launched the Omen series of gaming laptops and desktops in India which will be available starting March 15.