After Sikka, Infosys senior VP and technology head Navin Budhiraja quits

Prior to Budhiraja, Sanjay Rajagopalan, who was heading Design and Research, had resigned from the company

Navin Budhiraja, Infosys' senior vice-president and head of technology, has resigned. He is the second key executive to quit the software services major after non-founder chief executive Vishal Sikka’s resignation about a month ago.

Budhiraja, who joined Infosys in August 2014, was one amongst the few key leaders brought in by Sikka to drive technology transformation at the Bengaluru-headquartered information technology services company.

He was the key leader for driving growth of Infosys’ artificial intelligence platform Nia. “Budhiraja has put in his papers in the past week,” said sources privy to the development. Livemint first reported Budhiraja’s resignation.

Industry analysts said that even though they were anticipating a few top-level exits after Sikka quit Infosys, Budhiraja’s resignation may have an impact on the key digital technology works at the company.

Prior to Budhiraja, Sanjay Rajagopalan, who was heading Design and Research, resigned from the company. Rajagopalan, who was one of the key leaders brought in by former chief executive Vishal Sikka in August 2014, has stepped down in a month’s time after Sikka’s exit from the Indian IT services major.

Rajagopalan was with Infosys as the head of Design and Research for nearly three years between August 2014 and September 2017.

He was driving key activities within the Design Thinking programme started by Sikka. The former SAP leader, who specialised in design related projects, conducted many training sessions for Infosys employees.

Sikka, the first non-founder chief executive of Infosys, brought in at least 14 leaders from his earlier company SAP to help him implement many digital technology-based initiatives.  

Earlier, Yusuf Bashir, Infosys’ global head of $500-million innovation fund, resigned. Bashir was part of Sikka’s core team and his exit was the third big loss in recent times after Ritika Suri and Sandeep Dadlani.

Nandan Nilekani returned last month to head Infosys after Sikka quit citing personal attacks on him, which the company, under its previous chairman R Seshasayee blamed Narayana Murthy for his exit.

Murthy had publicly raised concerns over corporate governance failure in the severance pay given to Rajiv Bansal, former chief executive officer, who had raised a red flag in the acquisition of Panaya, the Israeli technology firm. He had also sought to make public an investigation report that looked into the Panaya acquisition and had given the company’s management a clean chit.