Rohan Murty debuts at Infosys

This is the first time Rohan Murty will be a part of Infosys in any kind of role

In a surprise top management reshuffle at Infosys, the company’s board has appointed N R Narayana Murthy as executive chairman. Even more surprising is that his son Rohan Murty will work as executive assistant to his father over the next five years from June 1, 2013.

This will be the first time that Rohan Murty will be part of Infosys in any kind of role. He will be mainly assisting his father as executive assistant to his father helping him in discharging his day to day operations in Infosys. He will be part of the Chairman's Office that Narayana Murthy wants to create in the company for his effective and smooth functioning as executive chairman over the next five years.

However, there is a fair possibility that he would take up a bigger role in the company in the days to come, according to industry insiders.

Even though Rohan was never part of Infosys earlier, he was seen with his father on many occasions at Infosys campuses. Prior to this role, Rohan was assisting his father in Catamaran Venture Fund, a venture capital firm established by Narayana Murthy with an initial corpus of Rs 600 crore.

Narayana Murthy has also hinted that he would bring in some of the members from Catamaran Ventures, which he founded after his retirement from the company.

Thirty-year-old Rohan was a topper throughout. After passing out from Bishop Cotton High School in 2001, Rohan went to Cornell for a bachelor’s degree in computer science. He has bagged the Best Student Paper Award from SIGCOMM, a professional forum for discussing communications and computer networks, for his papers on data communications and networking areas.

Rohan’s passion for information technology came to light when he was still in school — he was chosen as the IT captain, even though neither Narayana Murthy nor his wife, Sudha Murthy, had ever pressurised him to take up any particular subject to secure his future.

Rohan Murty is a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. He has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Harvard University and a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Cornell University and has held fellowships at Massachussets Institute of Technology (MIT), Caltech and Microsoft Research. He has authored several papers and patents as part of his research on wireless and mobile computing.

If appointed, Rohan Murty's term as Executive Assistant to the Chairman would be co-terminus with that of Narayana Murthy. Rohan Murty has requested that he should also be paid only a token compensation of Rupee One per year.

However, he will not have any major leadership role to play in the company. "Rohan will be my Executive Assistant. He has no leadership role", Narayana Murthy said.

“The only role that Rohan has is to make me more effective; that’s it,” Murthy said.

Rohan Murty was previously a Computing Innovations Fellow at MIT. A Siebel Scholars Fellowship and a Microsoft Research Fellowship supported his graduate school wok at Harvard. He has interest in philosophy, history and the classics. He is also involved with the Murty Classical Library of India.

Rohan is married to Lakshmi, daughter of Venu Srinivasan, Chairman, TVS Motor and Mallika Srinivasan, Chairman, TAFE.

THE JUNIOR MURTHY

* A Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, from where he also has a PhD in computer science
* A Bachelor’s degree in computer science from Cornell University
* He has held fellowships at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, California Institute of Technology and Microsoft Research
* Author of several papers, he has patents as part of his research on wireless and mobile computing
* He is married to Lakshmi, daughter of Venu Srinivasan, Chairman, TVS Motor, and Mallika Srinivasan, Chairman, TAFE

Source: Harvard University website