Bengaluru: Infosys on Thursday announced the appointment of former SAP executive Vishal Sikka as its next chief executive officer and managing director, ending a long period of uncertainty, and consequ-ent instability, over who would lead the company after Shibulal, the last of the founders, retires.
In doing so, N.R. Narayana Murthy, the company’s iconic founder, also wiped the Infosys slate clean with none of the founders on the company’s board after June 14: Murthy exits as the company’s chairman and from its board immediately, as does co-founder and vice-chairman Kris Gopalakrishnan; current CEO and MD Shibulal will step down on July 31, 2014, some nine months ahead of his retirement date. Mr Murthy’s son Rohan Murty, who had served as the former’s executive assistant over the past year, will exit the company along with him on Saturday.
Dr Sikka the first CEO of a top Indian outsourcing company to have a PhD in computer science, and from Stanford University, at that is credited with the “intellectual turn-around” of the world’s biggest enterprise software maker SAP and was the man behind its game-changing HANA in-memory database technology.
Dr Sikka is a US citizen and lives in California. As Infosys CEO, “I will continue to be based there. I love California. But I will be in India and Bengaluru a lot”, Dr Sikka said in reply to a question — a small but crucial detail for a Bengaluru-based company, whose biggest market is the US, and which is looking for its leader to connect with its 1,60,000 employees.
He declared that Infosys under him would continue on the path that it is on, while looking for breakthrough innovations, without being disruptive.
