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Business News/ Companies / People/  Vishal Sikka takes over as Infosys CEO, shares vision with employees
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Vishal Sikka takes over as Infosys CEO, shares vision with employees

In a letter to staff, CEO Sikka says Infosys should not lose focus on bread-and-butter outsourcing business

Infosys needs to develop world-class software products in order to remain relevant to its Fortune 500 clients, says Sikka in a letter to staff after taking over as CEO on Friday. Photo: MintPremium
Infosys needs to develop world-class software products in order to remain relevant to its Fortune 500 clients, says Sikka in a letter to staff after taking over as CEO on Friday. Photo: Mint

Bangalore: Infosys Ltd needs to develop world-class software products in order to remain relevant to its Fortune 500 clients, without losing its focus on the bread-and-butter outsourcing business, Vishal Sikka said in a letter to staff after taking over as chief executive officer on Friday.

Sikka also said India’s second-largest outsourcing firm needs to work closely with start-ups across the world to ensure they do not miss out on newer, cutting-edge software innovations.

“I am really looking forward to serving as the CEO of Infosys, one of the most iconic companies we know. To lead Infosys is nothing less than a privilege, and an opportunity of a lifetime," said Sikka, who was previously the global product head and board member at Germany’s SAP AG.

“We will work with the start-up community—amplifying their reach and accelerating their road maps—to achieve this. We will further reinforce our focus on intellectual property, products and platforms, to drive new scale and new economics," he said in his message.

Sikka also cautioned that the company needs to maintain its focus on traditional software development and maintenance businesses.

“We must continually get better at everything that we do today without disrupting the foundation that has got us to where we are. We must then quickly augment this by going after software opportunities with clients—to create next-generation, intelligent solutions," said the 47-year-old, who will be based in California.

In the message, Sikka also praised employees for contributing ideas to an initiative called Murmuration that he put in place after the announcement of his appointment. The Murmuration drive is a crowdsourcing initiative that encourages employees to submit ideas to improve the company’s core and important businesses.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal on Thursday, Sikka gave early indicators on his strategy for Infosys, outlining plans for a new $100 million venture fund that will invest in start-ups and help incubate ideas and early-stage companies, as part of a drive to spur innovation and help Infosys shed its tag of being a low-cost outsourcer.

The move to invest $100 million into start-ups was first announced by Infosys in April 2013, when the company was struggling to kickstart growth in its products and platforms business, which currently generates about 6% of Infosys’s overall revenue.

In the interview, Sikka also vowed to help Infosys regain its lost glory and reclaim its prized bellwether tag, having lost it to faster-growing rivals such as Tata Consultancy Services Ltd (TCS) and US-based Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp.

Sikka has spent the past month-and-a-half reaching out to some of Infosys’s largest customers such as Daimler AG, top Infosys executives, other employees and friends as he prepared to take up the daunting task of helping Infosys become the standard-bearer for India’s $118-billion information technology (IT) industry all over again.

Sikka’s top priority for Infosys will be to help it regain industry-leading growth by exploiting its core outsourcing business, while ensuring the company does not fall behind in the innovation race and lose out to peers in the area of newer technologies such as analytics and cloud computing.

He will also have the challenge of stemming an alarming attrition rate, with at least one in every five Infosys employee leaving the company in the last quarter.

“Pravin (chief operating officer U.B. Pravin Rao) and I are now spending many exciting hours every day discussing and shortlisting the ones which will be at the heart of our transformation plan. I am convinced that the most efficient way for us to get ahead—perhaps the only way—is to collectively chart out the best course and move as one cohesive unit, as individual as each one of us, and yet together as a larger one, learning from and teaching one another," Sikka said in his message on Friday.

“It’s a feeling not unlike the one evoked by (German author) Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, when he comments ‘You have once again had an idea, have done something, have heard the bird in your chest singing and have followed it!’" Sikka added.

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Published: 01 Aug 2014, 06:13 PM IST
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