Micromax appoints former Amazon executive Ashish Agrawal as chief technology officer

New Delhi: Ashish Agrawal has been appointed as the chief technology officer (CTO) of homegrown handset maker Micromax.

Before joining the Gurgaon-based phonemaker, Agrawal worked as the CTO for mobile and cloud services player Sirqul. Agrawal has 16 years of experience in mobile, e-Commerce, payments, web services and large scale distributed systems of which, he spent 14 years in eCommerce giant Amazon in software and product development among others, Micromax said in a statement.

He has played key roles on early stage businesses and technologies inside Amazon including Amazon Anywhere (mobile), AWS and payments and also lead development of m-commerce applications for Amazon.com, it added. At Micromax, Ashish will be responsible for defining the vision and the direction of software services and driving new initiatives to provide a strong impetus to brand Micromax," the mobile phone maker said.

Micromax Informatics CEO Vineet Taneja said: "With his rich experience in relevant areas at a global scale, Ashish will help us build technology platforms that will further strengthen our leadership."

Earlier this month, research firm Canalys said Micromax with 22 per cent share had overtaken Samsung (20 per cent) as India's number one smartphone seller, a claim the Korean electronics giant has disputed.