Hunt for Infosys' New CEO

BANGALORE: Infosys, India’s third-largest software services company is in search of its fifth and first non- founder Chief Executive Officer (CEO), to succeed its current CEO, SD Shibulal. Infosys has departed from its tradition of having founders as CEOs and is in the process of short-listing internal and external candidates for this post. The panel appointed Development Dimensions International to nominate candidates internally and Egon Zehnder to nominate candidates externally, reports the Economic Times.

The search started immediately after Shibulal expressed his desire to retire before his superannuation in Jan 2015 or after the new CEO is appointed.  The top contestants for this post internally are B.G Srinivas and Pravin Rao while Francisco D’Souza, Chief Executive Officer of Cognizant; Salil Parek, Capgemini’s CEO; and Shanker Annaswamy, former IBM India MD are people who  could probably be chosen. 

After the return of Narayana Murthy, the founder and executive chairperson of Infosys in 2013, the company has seen the resignation of eleven senior executives and many young executives. He proposed to take tough decisions to restore the company’s fortunes. Murthy also made decisions to fire employees who do nothing but get huge salaries, because of which Infosys had the largest attrition rate for the financial year 2013-2014.To prevent many more people from quitting, the company gave a hike of 6-7% to offshore employees. The company is also reportedly recruiting people from big business schools in the U.S. like MIT and Harvard.

Experts believe that hiring a person from outside will benefit the company with their fresh ideas that will fasten the recovery process of the company. Even after the promotion of two inside members to president, Narayana Murthy said that and external candidate might be selected. Others within the company believe that B.G Srinivas and Pravin Rao, both promoted to the post of President, are more likely to become CEO. According to the company, Srinivas has managed multibillion-dollar projects with Infosys and he is very good at handling and meeting clients. Pravin on the other hand has great expertise in back- office operations.

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