 "With eye on $20 billion revenue target, Vishal Sikka promotes executives")
Infosys chief executive Vishal Sikka has promoted over 170 top leaders, elevating at least eight of them as executive Vice Presidents as an incentive to push them to achieve his $20 billion revenue target by 2020.
Earlier this month, Infosys for the second time cut annual forecast in three months on account of uncertain business environment and the sharp drop in volumes in traditional IT services. While the drop has been substantial, the growth in emerging areas such as automation, digital, and cloud has not been as steep to offset the dip.
At the same time, Sikka, who took over as the first non-founder CEO in 2014, has seen several senior leaders quit, including Infosys loyalists for over two decades such as Samson David. Seven executive vice presidents including former consulting head Sanjay Purohit, former healthcare and life sciences head Manish Tandon and former BPO head Anup Upadhyaya left Infosys in the last year.
To stem this exodus and incentivise leaders to perform more aggressively towards his strategy of selling services with an overlay of software, Sikka has taken efforts to increase employee stock options, salaries, and offer promotions.
Two weeks ago, he offered million dollar packages to four presidents who drive sales that require consulting than pitching for contracts based on tenders. The eight new executive vice presidents will take the total tally to 14.
It includes Narsimha Rao Mannepalli, SVP and head of independent validation services, who replaced Samson David as cloud, infrastructure and security head, Satish H C, SVP of data and analytics, Ritika Suri, former colleague at SAP of Sikka and head of large deals, Deepak Padaki, head of M&A, Richard Lobo, SVP and head HR, Jayesh Sanghrajka, deputy CFO, Karmesh Vaswani, head of Europe for retail, CPG and logistics, and Koushik R N, head of procurement.
An Infosys spokesperson confirmed the elevations. The Times of India reported the development first on Thursday.
