 "Employees of Indian software company Infosys walk past Infosys logos at their campus in the Electronic City area in Bangalore")
Infosys chief executive Vishal Sikka saw the exit of the seventh key executive in Sanjay Purohit, since he took over as the boss of India's second largest software exporter.
Sikka shuffled Purohit – sending him to head the consulting arm in the US and moving him back to India in July to work on strategic initiatives – as business slowed down and the company had to cut yearly forecast. He replaced Purohit with Rajesh Krishnamurthy, who was earlier heading the energy and utilities vertical.
A Infosys spokesperson confirmed his exit, which was reported first by the Times of India.
Infosys has struggled to sell itself as a consultant to chief executives of global companies in an effort to fetch long-term high margin contracts. The Bengaluru-based software behemoth had in the past set up a consulting subsidiary and acquired Zurich-based Lodestone, which had expertise in systems, applications & products implementation consulting. However, it saw key consultants exit eventually.
Infosys is still considered an outsourcing shop that can cut IT costs for global firms by moving work offshore, rather than helping them strategically in deciding on their technology road-map. This has been worrying Sikka too, as he brings in new measures such as design thinking and zero distance by getting project managers to pitch how they improved work for their clients. He has also put in efforts to automate routine work — repeated work that requires less experienced staff.
"By and large, the conversations that we have are these IT-oriented kind of conversations that are largely cost- and RFP (request for proposal)-driven. I have accepted this and we are transforming in this segment too, but that is one source of unhappiness for me. I wish that we had the ability to have a much more strategic conversation. We have started that but are still at a relatively small number of clients," Sikka admitted last month at an analyst call.
In the last two years, Infosys has seen exits in Sanjay Jalona, Michael Reh, Samson David, Manish Tandon, Ronald Hafner and Anup Upadhyay. Of these, three were executives that Sikka brought to Infosys since he took charge.
