Infosys founder N R Narayana Murthy hinted as much when he found fault with the current board for its governance lapse. It has been a long friendship for Murthy and Subrahmanyam, whose motto of globalise or perish helped the fledgling Infosys to the world of good corporate governance practised by global companies.
In 1998, when Subrahmanyam joined the Infosys board, India’s software exports were less than $2 billion. It was the time when India’s IT industry was capitalising on the Y2K boom, by being body shoppers when the US needed thousands of engineers to fix a bug in computer systems across industries.
In the US, programmers, who built the initial computing systems for banks, airlines and enterprises, had till then to save computing space written only for the last two digits to denote the year instead of four digits. With the year 2000, there was a threat of dates changing to zeroes, which could have crippled computer systems across the US.
Infosys and other Indian firms capitalised on this opportunity, initially sending engineers to the US to work and then built a model of delivering work offshore from India at a fraction of the cost done in developed markets.
In 2011, when he stepped down as independent director at the age of 65, Murthy had retired as also Nandan Nilekani, who took up the Aadhaar project. The IT revolution was already under way, with the sector generating significant foreign exchange for the country and contributing to nearly five per cent of India’s GDP. “During this period, the company’s revenues, profits and employee strength grew one hundred times, impressive in any part of the world,” Subrahmanyam said in a statement.
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