A surprising piece of news jolted the Asia Pacific IT industry watchers in April this year. HCL Technologies, one of India's top IT services company, had lost its president and Asia Pacific region head, Virender Aggarwal.

Aggarwal had steered HCL's business quite effectively in the last three years in the region (he had joined HCL Technologies on 1 May 2009). During his time, HCL's growth in the region was spectacular (60 percent year-on-year growth, for instance). It became the fastest growing region for HCL. He started many new initiatives in Singapore including the HCL Mobility Lab and the Lilly HCL Co-innovation Lab. Why then did he leave HCL Technologies? And most importantly, where was he headed now?

For sometime, no one had an answer to this question.

Contrary to his soft-spoken image, Aggarwal had made a similar sensational exit in 2009 from Satyam after the company's chairman B. Ramalinga Raju confessed of falsifying the accounts of the company to the tune of US$1 billion. This must have been a hard decision for him. After all, he was instrumental in consolidating the fragmented AP market for Satyam. He founded the company's regional headquarters in Singapore. And how did he start? He had started off with a staff of three people in Singapore in 2000, and went on to scale up the business into 15 development centres and 33 sales offices across 20 countries with over 4,000 employees.

So, where was this remarkable technology leader going now? Had he been poached by one of the biggies-TCS or Infosys?