You’re reading it here first: Anand Raman, VAS Head for Idea Cellular is joining STAR India as VP for Mobile Entertainment. Raman begins his stint at STAR in the first week of July and will report to Viren Popli, Sr VP Mobile Entertainment. Raman had been with Idea Cellular for 3.5 years, prior to which he had a short stint at Bharti Telesoft, where he handled Western Region Sales. Before that, he was with Mahindra BT (now TechMahindra). During the 8 years that he was with Mahindra BT, Raman handled software design to offshoring of projects to account and bid management.

This is the second big ticket move from an operators side to the content provider/aggregators side in recent times - earlier this year, we’d broken the story of Manoj Dawane, former COO for Uttaranchal and UP-West joining as the CEO of Mauj Telecom. Is this indicative of a trend that larger content providers feel the need for senior execs who understand the operators way of working? It probably is.