After co-founder and chairman N.R. Narayana Murthy stepped down from his post on Friday, K.V. Kamath, who is also the non-executive chairman of ICICI Bank, is taking over as the first non-founding chairman of the software major.
Kamath has been a board member of Infosys since 2007 and also serving as an independent director, but this is the first time he would chair the board of a technology company.
While co-founder and erstwhile chief operating officer S.D. Shibulal is the new managing director and chief executive officer of the company, Kris S. Gopalakrishnan has taken the responsibility of the executive co-chairman.
Murthy co-founded Infosys in 1981, along with six other software code writers, as co-founders at Pune with just Rs. 10,000 as seed capital by borrowing from Sudha Murthy (his wife) who raised the money by mortgaging her gold jewellery.
After serving as chief executive till 2002 and handing over the baton to Nilekani, Murthy continued as executive chairman till 2006 and became chief mentor in 2007, creating enormous wealth to thousands of investors and millionaire employees, besides making Infosys the first Indian firm to be listed on the New York-based Nasdaq in 1999.
In his farewell speech on Friday, he said, "I want to see innovation in HR, finance, sales, marketing, and other areas. Infoscions should ask, ‘how can I make things faster, cheaper, and better."
The new leadership is expected to guide the software major to greater heights, by following Murthy's vision.
CEO's warning on client spending
Meanwhile, new CEO Shibulal warned that clients may eventually end up having to cut their information technology budgets for 2011 if they continue to delay making spending decisions because of the economic troubles in the U.S. and Europe, said CEO Shibulal.
According to the Wall Street Journal, clients may also delay finalizing their technology budgets for 2012 to the first part of that year compared with the usual practice of doing it at the end of the previous year.
“There is definitely a delay in decision-making.... But we're not seeing any immediate effect,” he said, according to the report.